Easy access to hacking tutorials worry experts.....toi news

PUNE: The alleged involvement of a Pune man in a global hacking network hasn't really shocked experts who note that underground hacking groups have the most potent weapon__ freely available open-source operating systems__ that enables them to hack computer passwords and banking servers.

Experts said these systems are available online for free and have tutorials that even people who are not too tech-savvy can follow. Designed to test if user applications and computers are secured, these testing tools are often misused by hackers. Add to this a host of other age-old hacking techniques, such as installing trojans or malwares on the victim's computers, using hardware or software key loggers, among others, and you have a virtual recipe for disaster.

Rishi Aggarwal, founder, Anti-Hacking Anticipation Society- HANS, told TOI that most underground hacker communities have plenty of options to hack among which using dedicated open source operating systems like 'Backtrack' and 'Kali' are most widely used. "These 'Operating Systems' are available online, free of cost. There are hundreds of such open-source 'Operating Systems' that are designed as a 'penetration testing framework', but are used by hackers to hack. Online tutorials make sure that any one can use them to hack anything," said Aggarwal.

Aggarwal said that software and hardware key-loggers--small devices that can be manually fixed on public computers (such as in cyber cafes, airports) and capture all keystrokes made on the computer's keyboard __ are also used by hackers.

A common hacking method involves sending malwares/Trojans and then installing them on the victim's computer, said Kirtar Oza, manager - Information Security at a top IT service provider. He said this can be done through any of the social engineering techniques-- either by sending a prank email or making a person download a software that looks authentic/useful or even making the person click on an advertisement that pops-up many times during browsing. "Trojan is nothing but a malware (malicious software) lurking in a file that looks authentic. Hackers send Trojans by binding the malware with any of the other normal files like a picture, word, excel or power-point file. When these dubious files are downloaded and opened by the victim on the computer, the malware automatically executes in the background and starts capturing all the sensitive information that includes stored credentials as well as keystrokes," said Oza.

Oza added that it is really difficult to say how many Pune groups or hackers are associated with any of the international hacking communities. "From what I understand, there is an existence of a 'Cyber Sleeper Cell' in India that steals/hacks the information related to credit card/debit cards or other sensitive account information at the ground level and sells it to the international market. Then, an international syndicate sells this info on their website," he added.

Cyber crime investigation expert Sandip Gadiya said that hardcore hackers find vulnerabilities in an email service, and then exploit it to compromise email accounts.

Anshul Abhang, managing director and CEO of a risk management company in the city, however, added that brute forcing the email account is very difficult for hackers in the current era of increased internet security. Brute forcing the account means using automated tools that generate a number of passwords till the combination matches the password the hacker wants to break into.

More ways to hack:

Sniffing: Hackers can sniff the data traffic on public internet wi-fi hot-spots and if sensitive information, like passwords, is going in a clear text, it can be captured easily.

Phishing Attack: A duplicate login screen is generated by viewing the-source code option in internet explorer. The new link is sent to the victim, and if the victim falls in this trap, he fills his login details on the fake page, that forwards a copy of typed username and password to the desired address of the hacker.

How hackers remain secure:

Oza said that everything is tracked online based on the IP address of users. "IP address is 'the identity' of the user on the internet. Hackers use tools available online to conceal their real identity, which means even if a hacker is from India, his/her IP address may be a spoof IP, which may show his/her location as Portugal or UK or Germany anything. So tracing the real identity is a big problem in cybercrime. Tools like TOR, VPN gate-ways, proxies are available to hide the real identity. These kinds of services are sold in underground markets that will help hackers to hack without getting busted," he said.

Hackers have easy ways to reach your account if it has been hacked before:

The easiest way for a hacker to keep accessing your email after you've supposedly re-secured your account is to set up forwarding rules that push your emails to them.

The next easiest way for a hacker to maintain access to your account is to alter your password recovery settings.

Email services offer lots of tools beyond just email and each one offers attackers more backdoors to your account.

How Steve Jobs launched a revolution in home computing and founded an army of passionate devotees....toi news

"I don't know a single person who watches the Super Bowl," said a worried Steve Jobs, then just 28 years old. The event he was referring to commanded a television audience of more than 80 million at the time, but Jobs' nervousness at the prospect of Apple spending $1.6m (£1m) to secure two 60-second TV ad slots during the game was understandable. After all, the kind of computers that Apple manufactured just didn't belong in the home of the average football fan; its pioneering Lisa machine was priced at an eye-watering $10,000, the equivalent to more than $23,000 (£14,000) today.

But this advertisement was going to be for a more affordable computer, one that Jobs hoped would change the world. He relented. And so, on 22 January 1984, two days before its launch, the Macintosh computer was announced to the world during a timeout in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, in which Los Angeles Raiders administered a thorough pummelling to the Washington Redskins.

The now-famous "1984" commercial, directed by Ridley Scott, was described by Lee Clow, its co-creator, as depicting "the struggle of the few against the many". Filmed at Shepperton Studios, the Orwellian nightmare culminates with a female athlete spinning around with a sledgehammer, eventually flinging it towards a gigantic screen featuring the face of Big Brother, smashing it and him to pieces. "On January 24th," intoned the voiceover, "Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984." In the event, the commercial was only screened once during Super Bowl; Apple's board, still fretful about the cost, flogged 30 seconds of its other slot to Hertz and 30 seconds to Heinz.

Few of the Americans who saw the ad would have understood the symbolic link that Apple was making between Big Brother and the dominance of IBM over the computer market, but the advert certainly caused a stir in the media - one that was perhaps disproportionate to the power of the product itself. The original Mac boasted a mere 128k of memory, a 9-inch monochrome screen, no hard disk, just two applications - a word processor and a painting program - and it retailed for a shade under $2,500. But at the launch at the Flint Center auditorium, in Cupertino,Steve Jobs removed it from its rather ugly canvas bag with blue handles, took a floppy disk out of his pocket and popped it into the awakening machine to a buzz of excitement.

This "advanced personal productivity tool for knowledge workers" introduced several new ideas to the mass market, although they weren't invented by Apple. The first and most notable was a point-and-click graphical user interface that borrowed several ideas from the Xerox Star, a pioneering computer that Xerox had failed to commercialise but which Jobs, and indeed Microsoft's Bill Gates, had recognised as being revolutionary. Microsoft had unveiled the first version of its competing operating system, Windows, the previous November, but it wasn't ready for release and wouldn't appear until late 1985. The Macintosh was thus something of a pioneer.

Not everyone was enamoured with it. In The San Francisco Examiner, John C. Dvorak wrote a systemic demolition of several of the features that would prove to be its most enduring. "The machine uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse'," he complained. "Who out there even knows what a 'font' is?" he asked, quite reasonably. "It uses icons to represent functions as though there were some intuitive knowledge on the part of the user as to what those icons mean," he fumed.

But he also skewered several obvious weaknesses of the 128k Mac: its small memory capacity, the associated need to continually insert and eject floppy disks, and the lack of available software; developers proved to be reluctant to re-purpose programs for an unproven machine with a new interface that replaced the traditional command-line. But despite its shortcomings and inferiorities, the Macintosh somehow managed to bestow upon itself a sheen of cool that its competitors lacked. Celebrities gave it their seal of approval, focus groups associated it with creative flair, and it established an almost romantic relationship with the user that had little to do with its capabilities or its processing power.

This pattern has continued with Apple products ever since. Even during Apple's darkest days of unprofitability, it managed to inspire fierce devotion in its users, many of whom fervently believed that they were using a superior product regardless of whether that was actually the case. People genuinely loved those Macs - and later those MP3 players, those phones and those tablets; they became part of your identity, and when those products were criticised you were criticised, too. Few people would ever be bothered to leap to the defence of a washing machine, but the ferocity of the seemingly endless Mac vs PC debate is a consequence of the emotional bond that has traditionally been felt by Mac users towards their Macs. When that bond is belittled by people who, often quite rightly, dismiss it as merely an appreciation of form over function, it actually hurts. Bizarre, but true.

But despite the sighs of pleasure and appreciative cooing from the great and the good, the original Macintosh didn't sell as well as Apple had hoped. It shifted 50,000 units in the first 74 days - not derisory, but not great either. While Jobs was convinced that the Macintosh represented the future of the company, Apple CEO John Sculley disagreed, believing that the Apple II - its business-focused machine - should be prioritised instead. The ensuing friction caused Jobs to be sidelined, and the following year he left the company in anger. According to Walter Isaacson's biography, Jobs sold nearly all of his 6.5 million shares in the five months following his departure, retaining just one that would allow him to attend shareholder meetings.

But despite his absence, Apple managed to establish an association between the Macintosh and creative industries that endures to this day. The combination of the $7,000 Laserwriter, the Macintosh and Aldus's Pagemaker software ushered in a desktop-publishing revolution; as a result, the Mac became the machine of choice for graphics professionals and the publishing industry. The commonly held belief that Apple has always received more press coverage than it deserves could well stem from this quirk of history; for many years, fawning articles were almost inevitably written, edited and laid out using Macs.

But winning over one industry by no means guarantees success, and it was Microsoft, not Apple, that benefited from the soaring popularity of home computing in the 1990s. People opted to buy cheaper PCs with the Windows operating system installed, while Macs tended to remain niche products for the more moneyed middle classes. "You're being ripped off," sneered users of the now-predominant Windows 95 operating system. "We're not particularly bothered, because our screens look marginally nicer," wailed back Mac users, relentlessly supportive of the plucky underdog. But Apple was floundering; its flagship Macintosh was suffering a profound identity crisis, with a bewildering range of machines on sale that were all essentially the same product in different cases. In the search for a new operating system to breathe life back into the Mac, CEO Gil Amelio made the decision to purchase NeXT, a company owned by none other than Steve Jobs; this brought Jobs back into the Apple fold in 1997 in what Amelio claimed was purely an advisory capacity, but Jobs quickly began manoeuvring, plotting and making his feelings abundantly clear. "The products suck," he said. "There's no sex in them any more."

He immediately launched the grammatically dubious but undeniably effective "Think Different" campaign, which aimed to establish Apple as a rebellious force, a home for "the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels" who saw the Mac as their weapon of choice. He slashed the Mac product range down to just four: a portable and a desktop in two flavours, consumer and professional (a combination still used by Apple today). "I came out of the meeting with people who had just got their products cancelled," Jobs recounts in Isaacson's biography, "but they were 3ft off the ground with excitement because they finally understood where the heck we were going." Design was no longer to be driven by electrical and mechanical considerations; it would now lead the way. Jony Ive, the young British designer who had become disillusioned with his role at Apple, was now invigorated by Jobs' direction. "We discussed approaches to forms and materials," he says in his biography by Leander Kahney. "We were on the same wavelength. I suddenly understood why I loved the company." Today, (Sir) Jony is Apple's senior vice-president of design, his work having transformed the company's fortunes.

The iMac, launched in 1998, was the first step in that transformation. According to Luke Dormehl in his book The Apple Revolution, it began life as a project called "Macintosh JFW" (Just F**king Works), and it was unashamedly pitched at consumers who had no interest in the arcane world of components, upgrades and system extensions. Its translucent blue casing was initially mocked but subsequently much copied; the absence of a floppy-disk drive and introduction of USB ports was immediately questioned but soon accepted as quite a good idea; its lack of computing power for the price was, as ever, widely criticised, but its appeal to computing novices (not stupid people, just computing novices) was undeniable. It shifted 278,000 units in the first six weeks. And while theiMac may have changed shape during the past 15 years from a translucent egg to a sleek oblong screen, its ethos is still very much, well, JFW.

The cash and the momentum that the iMac brought to Apple is still in evidence today. The iPod was, on its launch in 2001, not particularly well received; it wasn't the first MP3 player on the market and it arguably wasn't the best, but Jobs' knack of timing product launches to perfection once again bore fruit, and today the iPod is synonymous with music on the move in the same way that the Walkman was in the 1980s. Following the announcement of the iPhone in 2007, one million units were sold in the 74 days it took the original 128k Mac to sell 50,000. Apple's skill at orchestrating events, stoking rumour and seducing consumers helped it to leapfrog Microsoft and become the world's biggest technology company (before eventually being overtaken by Samsung) and, in 2011, it even overtook Exxon for a while to become the world's most valuable company full stop. Yet the Mac, the foundation on which the entire Apple empire was built, accounted for fewer than 10 per cent of all computers connected to the internet, while Windows machines accounted for nearer 90 per cent. A strange measure of success.

There'll be a mini-revenge taking place soon; this year, for the first time, devices running Apple operating systems are predicted to outsell devices running Windows - but it's in the mobile sphere where that particular battle is now waged, with Google's Android OS having become Apple's nemesis. Steve Jobs is no more, of course, and without his assured presence, many have questioned whether Apple's success can be sustained. But where other companies might always dominate in terms of sheer numbers, Apple will continue to reign, at least in the minds of its employees and its customers, in terms of exclusivity, status and beauty.

We all know, deep down, that people's work can hardly ever be distinguished by the platform on which it was created (have you ever heard anyone say, "I bet you cropped that JPEG on a Mac"?) but Apple has now tried to persuade us for 30 years that our choice of platform really, really matters. And so, as desktops and laptops are eventually replaced by tablets and phones, the Mac will eventually go to its grave maintaining that it was always the best, while its faithful, doting users will nod in wistful agreement. "Computers and society are out on a first date in this decade," said Steve Jobs when the Macintosh launched 30 years ago, "and for some crazy reason we're in the right place and right time to make that romance blossom." Such is the power of love.

'Biggest' global hacking network busted, Pune man held..

NEW DELHI: In what is being termed as the biggest international hacking scandal, possibly involving corporates, associations and big individuals, coordinated raids were conducted by investigative agencies in India, China and Romania, on the basis of intelligence fromFederal Bureau of Investigation about the "organised hacking" happening in three countries and others. In India, the Central Bureau of Investigation conducted raids at four places including Mumbai, Pune and Ghaziabad and arrested the alleged mastermind hacker in India - Amit Vikram Tiwari (31), son of a former army colonel, said sources. 

Interestingly, the controversial cricket league - Indian Premier League- is back in news again with the hacking scandal. According to highly placed sources, people connected to the IPL had approached Tiwari for hacking into the some accounts but they reportedly had a dispute over money after which work was not reportedly completed. CBI is investigating the IPL connection with the hacking. Officials refused to divulge details but hinted that some people associated with the tournament wanted high-level hacking done. 

The primary investigations have revealed that corporates, individuals and even companies - "the clients" - had approached the hackers either for marriage disputes related issues or commercial purposes, which sources described as "corporate rivalry". 

It is suspected that Amit Vikram Tiwari is main hacker in India but he was in touch with people abroad and master-hackers are based somewhere else. Sources also said that most of clients who approached Tiwari for hacking into email accounts and websites were foreigners. All possibilities -- national security, corporate hacking, financial fraud and hacking into government departments and secret units, are being probed by CBI in coordination with FBI. 

Officials say that 900 email accounts were hacked between February 2011 and February 2013 by international hackers including Tiwari and 171 accounts out of these belonged to Indians. "It has been alleged that a number of internet websites advertised that the website operators could get access to e-mail account in exchange for a fee varying from $250 to $500. The customers desirous to get unauthorized access, submitted e-mail accounts to these websites. Upon receipt of the order, as well as the e-mail addresses, the website operators gained access to such e-mail accounts and sent a proof of such access to the customers. On receipt of payment from Customers these website operators shared the password with the customers," said CBI Spokesperson Kanchan Prasad. CBI has booked Tiwari and unknown hackers for criminal conspiracy, theft of information and Section 66 of Information Technology Act. 

Sources say that payments were being received by hackers through western union money transfer and web-payment portal paypal.com. 

What has baffled investigators is that FBI tracking the scandal. It is being suspected that some accounts related to United States government and big corporates there were also hacked after which FBI tracked the hosting sites, used for hacking, in India, China and Romania. In India, Tiwari and his fellow hackers were using two primary websites - and from Pune. 

CBI Director Ranjit Sinha said that this was part of an international law enforcement operation and CBI had registered two FIRs against suspect operators of hacking websites. "The operation is product of an international investigation coordinated by Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Combating Organised Crime (DCCO) of Romania, CBI and the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) of China and raids in three countries were carried out simultaneously," said Sinha.

The FBI officials had been reportedly having regular meetings with CBI in New Delhi over past few months and a preliminary enquiry was registered last month itself and it was decided that coordinated raids would be conducted in all the countries. FBI has launched major operation against hackers located globally last year as part of which Romanian authorities have arrested a hacker known as 'Guccifer' on Thursday who was infamous for hacking into accounts of powerful leaders. It is alleged that Guccifer leaked online Colin Powell's personal emails, an unreleased script of Downton Abbey, and the paintings of George W Bush. 

CBI sources say they had no information about arrests made in Romania and China as it was the domain of authorities in those countries and it was only concerned with the probe in India. 

CBI officials, after arresting Tiwari from Pune, were bringing him to Delhi for interrogation. He has initially given some inputs about his clients and people whose accounts were hacked. Agency has recovered his computers, laptop and hard-drives for retrieving the data. 

Sources say that Tiwari, who had reportedly done his engineering from Pune, had been arrested in 2003 as well for trying to defraud a Mumbai based credit card processing company. Mumbai Police had arrested him for the scandal. 

62 Indians shortlisted for permanent human settlement on Mars

London: Over 1,000 aspirants, including 62 from India, have been shortlisted for an ambitious private mission to send four men and women on a one-way trip to Mars in 2024 to establish a permanent colony on the red planet.

The Netherlands-based non-profit organisation Mars One announced the selection of 1,058 candidates from the applicant pool of over 200,000 hoping to establish human life on Martian soil.

The applicants came from over 140 countries and more than 20,000 Indians had applied for the first round.

According to SPACE.com, of those who made the first cut, 297 are from the US. Canada is the second best represented country with 75 candidates, followed by India with 62 and Russia with 52.

Mars One co-founder Bas Lansdorp described the shortlisted candidates as "first tangible glimpse into what the new human settlement will truly look like."

"We're extremely appreciative and impressed with the sheer number of people who submitted their applications. However, the challenge with 200,000 applicants is separating those who we feel are physically and mentally adept to become human ambassadors on Mars from those who are obviously taking the mission much less seriously," Lansdorp said.

All applicants were notified via e-mail of their application status. For those who were not selected in this round, there is still a chance they could reapply at a later date, which has not yet been determined, Mars One said.

"The next several selection phases in 2014 and 2015 will include rigorous simulations, many in team settings, with focus on testing the physical and emotional capabilities of our remaining candidates," Norbert Kraft, Chief Medical Officer of Mars One, said.

"We expect to begin understanding what is motivating our candidates to take this giant leap for humankind. This is where it really gets exciting for Mars One, our applicants, and the communities they're a part of," said Kraft.

Mars One plans to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. Crews of four will depart every two years, starting in 2024. The first unmanned mission will be launched in 2018, the organisation said on its website.

SMAC [ social,mobile, analytics, cloud ]

As the most disruptive force ever int the history on the IT industry, the unique power of SMAC [ social,mobile, analytics, cloud ]  comes from the way it comines different technologies.Individual smac technologies have well developed over last few years.And combination is now ripe for causing big shifts.
mobile phone are selling in large number and mobile networks have matured.Cloud computing is more than just an idea.And analytic ties all these nicely to provide a combine package that is powerful.