A Horizon (Nebraska) High School student used a cell phone to hack into the school's network and shut it down.  Computer expert Dr. Robin Gandhi, assistant professor of information assurance at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, said it is not that difficult to do.  Sheriff's deputies said the student used a process called "ARP spoofing" which allows an attacker to alter routing on a network, and set up a "man-in-the-middle attack."

In Software Assurance in Education, Training & Certification Life Cycle Support Volume I – (Version 2.1, March 1, 2011), Gandhi writes:

Current events related to cybersecurity encourage a fundamental shift in the way we think about educating and training a workforce prepared to address security issues in all phases of a software system.

Read more: http://faculty.ist.unomaha.edu/rgandhi/.

District Court Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton (N.D. Cal.) overturned the $1.3 B Oracle Award against the German software company SAP. Oracle's expert calculated its loss as $408.7 million while SAP's expert  argued $28 million. Judge Hamilton has ordered the lawsuit be retried, unless Oracle agrees to a settlement offer of $272 million.

Read the opinion: http://www.cand.uscourts.gov/casesofinterest.

Administrative Law Judge Theodore Essex turned down Google's request to disqualify expert Dr. Robert Stevenson in the dispute between Microsoft and Motorola over the Android operating system.  On August 10, Google filed a non-party motion with the US International Trade Commission claiming MS disclosed confidential source code to Stevenson without his having been cleared with Google first.

MS alleges that Motorola’s use of Android violates their IP rights.  The computer expert reviewed code for the Android, the mobile OS #1 in consumer sales.

Computer Blog Today reports that a computer expert witness took the stand on Thursday in Pittsburg to explain information found on Richard Poplawski’s computer hard drive, and what websites he visited just hours before the prosecution said he shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers.

Read more: computerblogtoday.com.

Several potential expert witnesses will appear in federal court this week in a civil fraud case pending against five former Qwest officials, including former chief executive Joe Nacchio.  Hearings will be held from Tuesday to Thursday to determine whether the experts will be allowed to testify during trial. The potential witnesses are Sharon K. Black, Sally L. Hoffman, Elliot Lesser and Scott C. Chandler, according to court documents.

Black and Chandler would testify as telecom experts for the defense, said attorney Kevin Evans, who represents co-defendant James Kozlowski, a former Qwest accountant. Hoffman and Lesser would testify for the Securities and Exchange Commission as accounting experts.

The SEC accuses Nacchio, Kozlowski, former Qwest president Afshin Mohebbi, former chief financial officer Robert Woodruff and former accountant Frank Noyes of orchestrating a fraud that inflated the Denver company's revenue by $3 billion from 1999 to 2002.

Shelton-based Health Net of the Northeast Inc. surprised state officials and regulators Wednesday when it admitted private information on 450,000 Connecticut residents has been missing for about a half-year.  According to the company and state regulators, an unencrypted portable disk drive containing personal information on past Health Net clients and providers disasppeared from the Shelton office in May, but not reported until now.

The company said the breach was not reported because it took a long time to conduct a detailed forensic investigation to determine what information is missing. According to state officials, the disk drive contained health information, Social Security numbers, bank account numbers and other personal information on members and providers dating to 2002.

Although the company said a special program is needed to view the documents, Tarek Sobh, a computer engineering expert and dean of the University of Bridgeport's School of Engineering, said that's not much protection.

For more, see connpost.com.

A New Jersey state appellate court has ruled that information from a GPS tracking device placed in the vehicle of a suspect can be not admitted as evidence during a trial unless there is expert testimony on the information's accuracy.  Investigators from the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office placed a GPS unit in a vehicle in 2005 to track Eric Pittman in a seven-month undercover drug investigation.

The prosecution sought to have the GPS information admitted into Pittman's trial. But the information was challenged by Pittman's lawyer, Steven Altman, who argued more expert testimony needed to be heard about the reliability of the GPS unit and if investigators had used the device correctly. 

The prosecution had initially argued that expert testimony was not needed because of the general acceptance of GPS technology, but Superior Court Judge Edward Coleman said a representative of the GPS's unit manufacturer, Orion, should be called to testify about the device.

Excerpted from mycentraljersey.com.

The intellectual property trial between Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC, Hsinchu, Taiwan) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC, Shanghai, China) began Wednesday in  Alameda County Superior Court.  The SMIC attorney said he will call a series of technology experts to show that what TSMC claims to be trade secrets are in reality process-related information that is readily available within the industry's published literature, with ion implant recipes as a promised example to be provided later in the trial. 

David Steuer of the Wilson, Sonsini said he will show evidence that "TSMC wanted to destroy SMIC and pick up the pieces" in an acquisition of SMIC. "Why? Because SMIC is in China, and in China TSMC cannot open up an operation with leading technology" due to Taiwan government technology transfer restrictions.  "This case is all about China," he concluded.

Excerpted from semiconductor.net.

Jurors were not convinced that a former Forsyth County, GA, Sheriff's deputy was not guilty of viewing child pornography on his work and home computers.  A federal jury found Milton Scott Pruitt guilty July 22 on two counts of receiving child pornography. Witnesses for the prosecution had previously argued that Pruitt used his work-issued account to tap into the county server to look at images of child pornography kept in another investigator's case file.

Tami Loehrs, a computer forensics expert for the defense, testified that she did not find images of child pornography on Pruitt's county-issued laptop computer. No evidence that Pruitt had downloaded the images was presented, but witnesses said the officer opened the files in March 2007.  Pruitt was fired from the sheriff's office in May 2007.

Excerpted from ForsythNews.com.

The second full trial of a US peer-to-peer file swapper begins next week.  Joel Tenenbaum, a Boston College grad student, will face RIAA lawyers who are fresh from a $1.92 million victory in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case and eager to go 2-0 in such prosecutions.  The record label companies want willful statutory damages of between $750 and $150,000 per infringement against Tenenbaum for 30 songs.

Iowa State computer science professor Doug Jacobson will testify as a computer expert while the defense has Harvard Law professor Charles Nesson.  The defense expert will argue that the 816 songs in Tenenbaum's KaZaA share folder back in 2004 were simply a "fair use" of the recording industry's protected work. 

Excerpted from ArsTechnia.com.