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Saturday, September 24, 2005

How Safe are you ?

I recently attended a seminar at Pune conducted by Ankit Fadia. It was my first visit to pune and the city seemed quite lovely, there was a calmness about it (compared with the ever hectice life in mumbai) and also quite lot of greenery. But the roads were extremely bad in almost all the areas in which i went during the day. It did not take me long to guess the reason -> it must have been the recent rains that caused havoc in these parts of the country.
Coming to Ankit, well he is a teenage prodigy. He has not ceased to amaze me since i got to know about him during my second year when there was a video conference of him in our college technical festival. This guy is one of the most important persons in the world of computer network security. If you are in that area and don't know about Fadia, i would say you really aren't much to be reckoned in computer security. For a few facts, ankit was supposedly born in Coimbatore, he is a gujju and did his schooling from the (in)famous DPS, R.K. Puram school in Delhi. He is currently studying in Stanford and is also a consultant to FBI, CIA, RAW as well so to many other big firms. And to think that he is all of 20....uffff. The intelligence sleuths in US of A were reportedly unable to work out the communication carried out by Osama with his Al- Qaeda members in the wake of Sept 11 attacks and they suspected the use of "Steganography" technique. So they called up ankit to help them on all that he knew and he helped them by giving information on how it works and helped them unravel the hidden messages. and he was just 16 at that time. Well one can probably go on and on about him but i rather not do that and leave it to the curious reader to google on net about him.
The seminar was basically on Computer Hacking, Network Security, ATM hacking and Mobile Hacking. Although the entire trip was quite costly, i felt i learnt at least something useful that day and the money and time spent was worth it. His start to the seminar really summed it up. He began with a few questions to the 500-odd audience in the jam-packed hall and to all his questions almost all hands went up.

Ankit Fadia: How many of you use Yahoo!, Hotmail etc for your emails?
Hands go up
A.F : Stop using them.
A.F: How many of you use the probably best search engine around, Google?
Hands go up
A.F: Stop using that. How many of you use Y! Messenger, MSN messenger, ICQ etc for chatting purposes?
Hands go up
A.F: Stop using them. How many of you use Microsoft Windows XP? stop using that. How many of you use ATM machines to withdraw money? Stop using them. How many of you use mobile phones to communicate, share pictures, music etc?. Stop using them.

Haha. Apparently all these things are some form of spyware and give out vital information of your system, without your knowledge. Information so trivial, yet vital that any unscrupulous person can easily gain access to your system and control everything. In fact he narrated an incident that happened in mumbai a few years back.
A woman used to live in a typical one room flat in mumbai. She was a gizmo freak and also addicted to computers. She had her own PC in that single room and had an always on broadband connection(or an equivalent one at that time). She was full time into chatting and also had webcam. What happened was that an attacker gained access to her system and started taking control over it and started even controlling the webcam that was connected to her system. Now he was getting live feed of everything that was happening in that single room without the woman being remotely aware of it. After a few months the lady went for an interview and on seeing her the interviewer immediately told her that why would i not give you the job? i enjoy seeing you everyday on all the porn sites :O :O :O. The woman got the shock of her life and realized something had gone wrong terribly. She informed the cops and they disconnected the connection and did the detective work. They traced the attack to a server in Russia, but never caught the attacker. For all they know, the attacker could very well be her next door neighbour connecting using a proxy server based in Russia.
Executing a perfect cyber crime is very very very easy. So the moment we get on to the net, we are in huge danger of being attacked unless we are careful enough to protect ourselves. Most of the attacks take place after the attacker gets to know your IP address. This can be easily avoided by connecting to the internet using proxy servers and also using a firewall such as ZoneAlarm(which incidentally i have been using prior to this seminar itself :D ). Ankit also explained other means by which one's IP address could be found out, such as during chat, file transfer, email etc. He also explained the different attacks and various methods of the same. The above incident was one of the worst cases of cyber crime. The attack could also take place for prank, to steal passwords, to steal other personal information, to steal intellectual property and what not.
Fadia also explained instances of ATM hacking and according to him Internet Banking, contrary to public opinion is much much safer than ATM banking if one took a few precautionary steps. Mobile hacking is the latest threat and he has also released his latest and fourth book along those lines recently.
Finally a bit of trivia to clear general misconception: Hackers are not bad people, in fact they are the good guys who work in tandem with police and help prevent the attackers or catch them. The crooks are Crackers.
So people if you want yourself to be safe from crackers or criminals, start thinking like a criminal. For only then would you know where are your weak spots and prevent them.


Friday, September 23, 2005

How callous can people get ?

Am just going to list out some of the incidents faced by few friends of mine over the past few years that i came to know only recently and needless to say was quite shocked to hear about them.

3 of my friends had decided to go back home at a very short notice and hence did not have reserved tickets. Since the number of trains from mumbai is much more than from here and also as mumbai isnt too far from here, they decided to go by that route. They boarded a bus and usually its an overnight journey and were of the view that they would reach mumbai early morning and from there would go to the station and look for the trains available and go in one of them. Then started the real "drama". There were all sorts of problem with the bus and by the time they reached andheri it was already 1030 or 11 :O :O. The driver at that point said that they had to get down as the bus couldnt go any further due to some problem. Now these people had booked their tickets in the hope of getting down at mumbai central. Most of the passengers were already furious and then there seems to have been a policeman nearby. He just calmly approached the bus driver and said you can let them get down here itself, only you have to pay the taxi fare for everyone till central...hahahaha (not all policemen are anti-public...remember!!!)
The driver had no option but to continue the journey and finally they reached mumbai central around 4. the last train going towards their destination was at 4.30 and they had no chance of getting the tickets and going...so end of story...but does the drama stop there..i thought it had, but then it seemed like just the beginning when i heard the rest of the story.

They decided to buy tickets for the next day and since the booking place was too crowded they decided to trust the "agents" there. (Never ever trust these ass#%#%@). So one of the agents went and booked the ticket and returned with a wait listed ticket. But behind the ticket was written in pen 3 seat nos and he went on to explain about a "VIP quota" which he had availed for their purpose. Then came the cost of those tickets. after some calculations which you will never understand with these crooks, it came to around 2700 that was almost exactly double the normal fare. the next day they came to the station and therein lied a bigger shock. there was no VIP quota or anything and all the seats were booked in the train :O. They then had to sit through the entire journey in the pathway before the wash basin and stuff and go...all that after paying double the usual fare....x-(

As they were sitting in the train before the train left mumbai, they met a sort of middle aged lady also going by their route. She boarded the compartment in which these guys were sitting and sat in the TTE's seat. one of my friends asked her ticket just to see the status and was totally shocked. In the ticket were three "Cancelled" words. :O. when asked about it the lady was totally stumped. Then they came to know what had happened. as she was rushing along the platform, one amongst the crowd asked her ticket to guide her to her compartment and then after seeing the ticket, neatly folded it and gave it back to her. ofcourse its not hard to guess what that rascal had done.
damn these people...
how cheap and low can they go...especially lot of this happens at mumbai. i was also cheated badly once when i took a taxi late night. since it was past midnight and i was travelling alone, i did not have the guts to argue though i knew that i was being cheated.
So coming back to the topic of this post...How callous can people get ????
let your views known...

Friday, September 16, 2005

First Kirukal

Resisted the temptation to register in blogspot for so long. Actually i started blogging just a few months back at Yahoo! 360. Was quite impressed by it and started writing my thoughts there. But the problem with 360 is that it is yet to really take off. So my blogs werent getting read or even if they were getting read they werent getting commented upon. Over a period of time, no matter how enthusiastic you are about a thing that you are working on, you need to get the attention of people, be it appreciation or criticization, you need someone to tell you something about your work to sustain the interest. Atleast with respect to blogging that holds true from my experience. So i have stopped bloggin there and have been really busy with ORKUT the last month or so :D
From there i have been seeing a few blogs and the temptation to register myself in blogspot starting coming back again. So far i could resist it. But the finally i saw a blog of my "akka"(sis through acquiantence) and she hadnt enabled anonymous comments...silly girl ;).
So here i am giving my first kirukals of india. Not sure how regular i shall be for almost most of views on various things are said in orkut and i wonder if i would be getting readers apart from the folks there. So usage of 'C n P' technology maybe a waste of time after all. Still lets see how things go...atleast now i have a blogspot id and can comment on all the blogs that interest me :D