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Lolita C. Baldor, Associated Press, On Sunday May 29, 2011, 4:13 am EDT

Hackers launched a "significant and tenacious" cyber attack on Lockheed Martin, a major defense contractor holding highly sensitive information, but its secrets remained safe, the company said Saturday.

Lt. Col. April Cunningham, speaking for the Defense Department, said the impact on the Pentagon "is minimal and we don't expect any adverse effect."

The Performance Testing Council is your gateway to freely exchange experiences, knowledge, and yes, passion with others in the practice of performance testing. Membership will help you refine your evaluation program as you learn from experts, share best practices, help define research, expand your marketplace and help establish common delivery standards.

"Years ago when we started writing checks, we might have been tackling five to 10 a day," says Paul Wood, a senior analyst with Symantec Hosted Services. "It's now well over 10,000 a day and growing." According to McAfee's 2010 Q2 Threat Report, the company identified 10 million pieces of malware in the first half of this year and is tracking close to 45 million in its malware database.

Vulnerability assessment products are also behind the curve, as Greg Ose and Patrick Toomey, both Neohapsis application security consultants, found when they recently set out to measure the relative effectiveness of various vulnerability scanners. "It's a question frequently raised by our customers," Toomey says. "They know the tools aren't going to catch all of the problems, but can they count on them to catch, say, 80% of the bad ones?" What Ose and Toomey discovered was far worse than even they had anticipated. Out of the 1,404 vulnerabilities accounted for by the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project during the sample period, there were only 371 signatures. In the best cases, the tools were in the 20% to 30% effectiveness range.

Toomey's observations are in line with those of security researcher Larry Suto, who earlier this year reported that Web application vulnerability scanners missed almost half (49%) of the vulnerabilities present during his tests.

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BELLINGHAM - Whatcom Community College's computer program is now considered one of the best in the country, especially in the areas of cyber security.The college was recently named as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance by the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.

"It is a major threat to our security," said Corrinne Sande, Computer Information Systems program coordinator at WCC,

WCC is one of only 13 two-year schools in the country with the designation, which was opened to community and technical colleges last year. The University of Washington is also a Center of Academic Excellence in this area, but for a university instead of a two-year school.

The Boy Scouts of America, which offers more than 120 badges ranging from archery to wilderness survival, next week will unveil a robotics merit badge meant to promote science, technology, engineering and math, fields collectively known as STEM. In doing so, the 101-year-old Texas-based organization is trying to remain relevant and better reflect boys' interests, said Matt Myers, who oversees the Boy Scouts' STEM initiative.

Developing the robotics badge requirements took 14 months and involved help from more than 150 scouts, their leaders and industry professionals. Ken Berry, who led the effort, said the badge is a bit overdue given that hundreds of thousands of children and teens already are participating in robotics competitions around the country. "We're promoting stretching of the mind like athletics promotes stretching of the body," said Berry, assistant director of the Science and Engineering Education Center at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Officials expect at least 10,000 of the nation's 2.7 million Boy Scouts to earn the new badge in the next year, compared with the roughly 500,000 who earn the most popular badge — first aid — each year.