America's UC Berkeley is to lead the fight for cybersecurity in the USA. Experts from a number of colleges, led by the California-based university, will work together at a new "TRUST" - or Team for Research in Ubiquitous Secure Technology - centre, which is expected to receive $19m of funding over five years.
The project was set up in response to increasing fears as people use computers for more and more tasks. S Shankar Sastry, the professor who will head up the project, said the idea is to look at ways to build more secure systems before a disaster along the lines of an "electronic Pearl Harbor". "If one thinks about the possibilities, they're really quite frightening," he said.
Of course, Berkeley might want to look at its own cybersecurity procedures first. As Neowin reported here, details of almost 100,000 students were stolen from the campus - because they were all being stored on the hard drive of a laptop computer.
View: UC Berkeley News
View: AP Coverage
