Task one. Get ready to translate first four passages and to give a summary of the text. 'Bullet time' to stop cyber attacks on power grids

30 April 2012 by Paul Marks

IN THE MATRIX, the famous "bullet time" effect showed how Keanu Reeves's character Neo was able to sway out of the path of incoming bullets, as time appeared to slow. Now the film has inspired engineers to develop a way to cope with cyber attacks on crucial infrastructure, such as electricity grids, water utilities and banking networks.

The idea, from security engineers at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, is to slow down internet traffic, including malicious data, to give networks time to deal with attacks. To do this, when a cyber attack has been sensed, an algorithm sends hyper-speed signals accelerating ahead of the malicious data packets to mobilise defences.

"Slowing the malicious traffic by just a few milliseconds will let the hyper-speed commands activate sophisticated network-defence mechanisms," says Sujeet Shenoi at Tulsa.

Such measures are needed because cybercriminals increasingly seem to target crucial industrial infrastructure. In 2010, for example, the Stuxnet worm infected Iran's nuclear programme. It was shown to be not so much a typical computer virus as a multifunctional weapon that can be reprogrammed to target any crucial industry. As industrial systems generally go for many years without software upgrades or password changes, they can often be vulnerable to such attacks.

Hyper-speed signalling could help, says Shenoi, although it would not be cheap to convert an existing network into one that can run the Tulsa team's algorithm. The reason? First, a data pathway has to be reserved for the use of hyper-speed command-and-control signals during an attack – and that could be seen as an expensive waste of capacity. And, when an attack is sensed by a scanning firewall-like sensor and the tainted data traffic is slowed down, more buffers and storage will be needed to cache the slowed data packets now swilling around on the network, otherwise crucial data could be lost.

Finally, new defence mechanisms need to be programmed into the network's routers, including the ability to inspect, tag and track suspicious packets, quarantine the risky ones and protect targeted devices on the network (like power grid relays, pump controllers or even hole-in-the-wall cash machines).

TASK TWO. Discuss the given abstract.

With memories of the tsunami that devastated the region in 2004 still fresh, residents fled from the coasts, not knowing whether waves were on their way.

A system of super-accurate GPS sensors being tested in several earthquake and tsunami-prone areas may change all that. Instead of passing tense minutes and hours waiting for deadly waves to make landfall, the system promises to be able to deliver warnings almost instantly, saving lives and possessions.

To complement seismometers, several groups of researchers are assembling networks of real-time GPS sensors that measure their locations every second within 5 to 10 millimetres, far more accurate than consumer GPS. When a quake strikes, the sensors can detect precisely how much the crust has moved.

The long-term goal is to integrate GPS with seismic stations to create a system that within a couple of minutes could measure earthquake magnitude, locate the fault that failed and determine whether a tsunami was imminent.