"That's a technique commonly used in a normal marketing email communications, but looks very out of place in an email about a security breach which tries to hammer home the point to 'Never click on reset-password requests in emails, " he said.

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The camp's re-engineering awards went to a group that developed a technique to alter the ID numbers on Global System for Mobile Communications cell phones and to another team that found a way to defeat a biometric fingerprint scanning system.

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Lamarr termed the technique "frequency hopping, " a forerunner of the spread-spectrum technology that is used today in communications applications such as Wi-Fi.

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