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.