By Abhinav Shukla & Ashutosh Rai
MBA-IT
IIIT Allahabad

Anjana Bajpai
MBA-IT
IIIT Allahabad

There is no rulebook for hackers to break into a system. However an organization must ensure they follow a security and monitoring framework which ensures all the boundaries and threat areas a covered. It is a challenge today not only to detect and remediate advanced persistent threat, but also to effectively address the issue in a timely manner.

There are three basic areas which need to be monitored and analysed to detect an Advanced Persistent Threat:
1. Network Traffic Analysis
2. Payload Analysis
3. Endpoint Behaviour Analysis

Network Traffic Analysis:
Network traffic is one of most important data the organization needs to analyse to detect any threat or a break in. By analysing the inbound and outbound traffic, any compromised system or network should be detected. This can include for example traffic patterns. Based on usage a baseline should be created of all the activities, and these can be compared to real time events to detect any anomaly.

To further strengthen this network forensics is an important activity that an organization should look into. Forensics would capture, store and analyse network traffic and provide data analytics to improve detection and remediation.

Payload Analysis
It is often very difficult to detect the actual extent of damage even when the compromise has been detected. Payload analysis helps in further analysing a malware or a compromised system to study its behaviour and detect the extent of damage it could have caused. It also helps in reducing false positive and also increases the effectiveness of detection. This is very effective in detecting malwares which bypass signature based verification.

However payload analysis is a time taking process. Moreoever sandboxing and replicating the exact environment is also a common challenge which all organisations face.

Endpoint Behaviour Analysis:
Endpoint Behaviour Analysis aims to detect any unwanted or suspicious activity within the endpoints. It can be a network related activity originating from the end point or an application behaviour anomaly.

One of the interesting technology is Application Containment. In this a suspicious application or a compromised application is allowed to function in a container (thus isolating it from accessing from any other data in the system). Its behavior is monitored and it is fed with some similar data to simulate its activity. However this is a resource consuming process and often not very user friendly.

As the threat scenario is changing, information security is no longer the work of individuals. An enterprise wide approach needs to be undertaken, taking into all key stakeholders, management, business and IT to achieve a collective goal to securing an organization.

Rahul Das
Consultant | Cyber Security
PwC, India
(IIITA, MS-CLIS 2011-2013)

How else can serials with little or absolute illogical, monotonous and sometimes irritating themes manage to continue for years in a row?

The same saas-bahu saga, packaged and repackaged, evacuated and refilled with little or no modifications what-so-ever, and the housewives with their eyes hooked on the box laugh (to the most obvious jokes), cry (to the over dramaticised emotional sequences), get excited (to the more than obvious and predictable situations) and listen to the characters’ self talking (which is obviously irritating, sometimes to excruciating extents). After-all, we all know what a vamp would think in that situation and how a courageous righteous bahu would be exercising her determination by making firmer resolutions at the same time.

Who talks like that?

The small screen celebrates womanhood. They (women) are everywhere. Almost every serial is woman centric, which shows her to be a determined, hard working, sacrificing and righteous when she is the good one and the exact opposite when not.

The plot is always over dramatized with the master ‘K’ formula in place, which neither the makers or the writers do away with, nor do the audiences want to get over with. It has for so long kept the audiences in a limbo, the comfy cuddly environment of falsehood that is their only escape from reality. The reality they prefer to ignore.

Womanhood no doubt needs to be celebrated, but I seriously believe there are other better ways to do it. Why not show stories with working housewives as their protagonists and the day to day problems they face, right from getting up from a tiring yesterday in the morning, to preparing breakfast for her family before leaving for work and looking after a child. Working in the office, facing the wrath of seniors, gaze by perverts, covering the mistakes by juniors in the team she manages, to tackling stressful situations (sometimes with panache and sometimes with a style so silent that the most undercover won’t get a hint of!!). The portrayal of such characters in all the naive simplicity and substance and then broadcasting the message in a subtle sarcastic manner would definitely multiply the impact of an act and the series as a whole. It is better not to always have all-inclusive dialogues. Sometimes when things are kept mum, and the audience is given the task to make things out for themselves within the dynamics of a drama set up, the interest evoked is by and large encouraging and people start loving the show, who then long for every next episode and gasp for more at the end of it. The people start to live with the characters as they do with their companions. In the recent years, there have been serials which have made a promising start, even had a breath of fresh air with them, but once the honeymoon period ended, things got back to ground zero.

Time to time, the intellectual fuel of the creative team exhausts and gets mileage only when they take little hints from here and there. And that is when the rot creeps in.

In a stark contradiction, the small screen dramas in the west thrive on a more serious and intellect stimulating and smashingly entertaining stuff made with sheer brilliance on the part of the script, story, screenplay and execution.

They make stories in the center of which lies a chemist (Breaking Bad), a serial Killer (Dexter), Scientists (Fringe), Medical Professionals (Dr. House), Lawyers (Suits), CIA (Homeland), Kings and Kingdoms (Game of Thrones), Supernatural stuff (Supernatural and Vampire Diaries) and many more.

They appeal equally to all, in spite of their dive into the technicalities of the profession of the characters they deal with. Such is the beauty of their content and display. The comedy shows are equally absorbing.

Indian television has been through a phase of evolution. YUDH – the story of the construction magnate with all his perfections and imperfections, family, life, fears, guilt, anxieties, plans, love, affection and foresight is just a beginning.

Divyanshu Ojha
MBA-IT (2012-2014 Batch)
IIIT Allahabad

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Introduction

It is the web development approach, which emphasizes on user experience practices to make reading easier with minimum scrolling, clicks and resizing required. It is responding to the size of the browser window or the device, maintaining a single code.

Why do we need RWD?

Web development has been in market since internet is. But why suddenly a new concept, which led to redesigning of thousands of existing web sites, was introduced and welcomed by all designers. Emerge of RWD is basically an outcome of astonishing progress of smart phones and tablets in market. Each month there is an increasing amount of people who switch to using mobile and tablets instead of desktops, for surfing.

To make the same website look good across all devices, there can be two approaches
1. Maintaining different code base for these devices. But here, you will have to develop different code base, which leads to high development and maintenance cost.
2. Use responsive web designing approach. You design for three device sizes but develop a single code base in HTML that makes the same website look good on large desktop monitors and small smart phones and anywhere in between.

How to create RWD?

It is the same HTML used for all devices, using CSS (which determines the layout of webpage) to change the appearance of the page. It relies on proportion-based grids to rearrange content and design elements. For example, media queries are used to make certain css styles apply only for devices with screen width as small as mobiles:

@media only screen and (max-width:500px){
#wrapper #nav{ margin: 0 0 0 -160px;
}

Popular responsive css frameworks in market

There are certain css frameworks available that make responsive development easier. The most popular are:
1. Bootstrap.
2. Foundation.
3. Gumby.
4. Skeleton.

Richa Deshwal
Deloitte. |Bengaluru Area
Email: deshwalricha8@gmail.com

1. The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. Why is it called Heartbleed?, because the bug is in the OpenSSL’s implementation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols heartbeat extension (RFC6520). The attacker can grab memory from a server, without leaving any traces. This gives attacker a copy of information in memory including keys, usernames and passwords, etc. This allows attackers to eavesdrop communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users. Bug was introduced to OpenSSL in December 2011 and has been out in the wild since OpenSSL release 1.0.1 on 14th of March 2012. The vulnerability is classified as a buffer over-read.

2. The ShellShock is a vulnerability in widely used bash command shell. Since bash is used in many systems and in many different forms, this can be exploited in various ways. This bug causes bash to execute commands when they are concatenated to the end of function definitions in values of environment variables. A remote attackers utilizes this bug to execute arbitrary code and commands without having proper privileges. To test whether a system is vulnerable, you can try popping open a shell/terminal and running this command :
env X=”() { :;} ; echo you might be vulnerable” /bin/bash -c “echo hello”
If “you might be vulnerable” pops up, your system has an exploitable version of Bash installed. Exploitable bash are also used in MacOS X, android and Windows Cygwin. Attackers exploited Shellshock using botnets to carry out distributed denial of service attacks. Shellshock also has the potential to be turned into a worm — a self-replicating piece of code that automatically propagates to all Shellshock-vulnerable systems, potentially causing untold damage. Shellshock was compared to Heartbleed in its severity.

3. POODLE attack, Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption attack, is a name given to exploit that takes advantage of way some browsers deal with encryption. Most of the browsers use TLS protocol for secure communication, but revert back to SSL 3.0 when TLS connection is not available for interoperability. An attacker takes advantage of this, using Man-in-the-middle attack, forcing use of SSL 3.0. POODLE is used to target browsers that uses SSL 3.0 protocol for encryption and authentication. Attacker exploits a design flaw in SSL 3.0, that allows the padding data at the end of a block cipher to be changed so that the encryption cipher become less secure each time it is passed.

POODLE is an example of a vulnerability that succeeds thanks to a mechanism designed for reducing security for the sake of interoperability. Such flaws call for extra care when designing systems in domains with high levels of fragmentation. In such domains graceful security degradation may become common.

Google researchers Bodo Moller, Thai Duong and Krzysztof Kotowicz discovered (and named) the POODLE vulnerability and warned the IT community that the only way to prevent POODLE attacks is to stop using SSL 3.0.

Out of the above three, Heartbleed was rated most serious vulnerability which affected systems for nearly 2 years. It resulted from improper input validation (due to a missing bound check) in the implementation of the TLS heartbeat extension. This shows that it was an implementation issue and not a design issue. POODLE as already mention resulted because of reducing security for interoperability. Since this was done intentionally, it can be mentioned in the category of design flaw. To avoid such incidents in future, we should think like both an implementer and an attacker while designing and implementing protocols and software.

The only solution to be protected against these and against many more unidentified vulnerabilities is to keep system updated and remain yourself updated about new vulnerabilities.

Anurag Shandilya
M.Tech (CLIS)
IIIT Allahabad

Hacking is legal, but cracking not. Crackers break into the system with some malicious intent for some personal gain. These personal gain may be for fame, profit or even revenge. They can modify, delete and steal critical and confidential information from the victim system. Hackers have quite advanced knowledge of operating systems and programming languages. They know different security holes within the system and the reasons for such holes. They are keen to seek further knowledge, share their discoveries without having intentions for damaging or stealing data. On the other hand, Crackers gain unauthorized access, destroy important data, or in short cause problems for their targets. Whatever the case may be, people give hacker a negative outline. A person can be a hacker regardless of age, gender or religion. It just depends on the technical skill of the person which vary from one hacker to other. Some of the hackers barely know to surf the internet, whereas other writes such software on which other hackers depend.

Types Of Hackers

Broadly speaking, hackers can be classified on the basis of their skills and knowledge or on the basis of type of work they perform. If we speak about the former one, we can rename hackers as Coders, Admins and Script Kiddies, while the latter one can rename a hacker into three more specific terms White Hat hacker, Black Hat Hacker and Grey Hat Hacker.

Coders: They are the real hackers, the one who revise the methods and the write the codes for the tools available in the market. They can find security holes in the software to create their own exploits.

Admins: They are the guys who use the tools developed by the coders. They don’t write their own code and techniques but explores the tools at their best to find different tricks and techniques.

Script Kiddies: They are the persons who reads out something on Internet, find few scripts online and apply them exactly in the same manner as it is specified on the Internet. They are the most dangerous categories. They can cause more harm because they don’t know what those codes and script means, they are simply applying it. They take advantage of the hackers’ tools and documentations available freely on the Internet, but they don’t have knowledge of what is going behind the scene.

White Hat hackers: In simple language, you can call them as good guy or Ethical Hacker. They focus on securing and protecting IT systems. They use their knowledge to locate braches in the system and find counter measures in the resource.

Black Hat Hackers: They are the second type of hackers which I stated earlier as Crackers or criminal hackers. They use their skills for malicious purpose and illegal activities. They break into others’ system for some malicious intent and focus on data stealing and security breaching.

Grey Hat Hacker: They are intermediate of White hat and Black hat hackers. They can act sometimes legally, for the goodwill, while sometimes not. They might not have malicious intent, but sometimes can commit crime during the course of their technical exploits.

Hactivist: They are another type of hackers who generally broadcasts political or social message through their work on the web. Recent example includes “the photo of Modi on website of AAP”. We can cover such persons under grey hat hackers.

Cyber Terrorists: They are the black hat hackers who generally attack govt. computers. They crash critical systems and steal confidential information from different specialized system specially govt. website.

Why Hackers Hack??

This is a quite good question for the argument, but we can’t specify the reason for the hackers to hack the system. It varies from one type of hacker to other.
Some of the reasons may include:

• Exploring additional knowledge
• Hacking for the hobby
• Information stealing
• Software cracking
• And many more endless reasons…

Prevention from Hackers

Ethical hacking in not illegal, it’s performed by the permission of the victim to explore something to the deeper level. If you ask me the way to prevent yourself from hackers then I’ll suggest only one thing: “don’t ever fight with any hacker. If you do, then please unplug your computer system and lock them away, so that no-one can touch your system, not even you!” But this is not the right way for the Information security, but this is important for you to protect your system from known vulnerabilities. You don’t have to protect your system from everything, In fact, you can’t even do so. However, we may adopt some techniques to prevent ourselves to a much better extent:

• Never share password with anyone, no matter how much he / she is close to you
• Never click on any unknown / unwanted link that is sent to you through chats or emails
• Avoid use of public computers
• Avoid use of public networks, especially free wifi. Free may be dangerous.
• Never use your personal online accounts such as emails or social accounts like facebook in any public network, NOT even in your office. Sniffers are all around.
• Don’t hit open to any unknown software programs
• Never let your PC be in touch with any of your friend who lies in any of the hacker categories mentioned earlier.
• Use any good antivirus and spyware program

Different Phases in Hacking

Here are the different steps that are performed by the hackers sequentially in order to attack the target.

• Information Gathering: Hackers seek to find out as much information about the victim as possible. They locate, identify and record information about their targets.
• Scanning: In this phase, attackers scan the networks and ports to find out the vulnerable port.
• Gaining access: This is the phase of real hacking. Once the hacker identifies about the vulnerable port, then they tries different methodologies to gain the access of that system.
• Maintaining access: After gaining the access, it is very mandatory to maintain the access for at least the time being in which hacking is being performed. Interrupt in access will cause loss of data or even loss in the connection.
• Performing required tasks: Once hacker gains access on the target system, they perform the required task on the target.
• Clearing the logs and footprints: Last but not the least, hackers need to clear the footprints and all the logs from the victim system, so that it’s not easy for anyone to trace the hacker. This is the reason for which hackers are called as Anonymous.

Methods of Hacking

Although there are countless methods for the hackers to hack into a system, and increasing day by day, major one includes the following, we are not going into the details as of now:

• Footprinting
• Social Engineering
• Denial of Service attack
• Keyloggers
• SQL Injection
• XSS (Cross Site Scripting)
• Spoofing
• DNS Attack
• Steganography
• Reverse Engineering
• Cryptography
• Trojans and bombs

Laws in India for Hacking

According to Pavan Duggal, Supreme Court advocate, First cyber law of India makes all cybercrimes punishable. These cybercrimes may include hacking, cracking, and publishing of information in the electronic form, damage to the computer source code, violation of confidentiality and privacy, and publication of false digital signature certificate. Different cases that gets covered in the laws include:

• Social media fake profile case
• Email account hacking
• Credit card fraud
• Online share trading fraud
• Tax evasion and money laundering
• Source code theft
• Theft of confidential information
• Software piracy
• Music piracy
• Email scam
• Phishing
• Cyber Pornography
• Online Sale of Illegal Articles
• Virus attacks
• And many others…

Kamal Nayan
Blogger at http://tipstricksandhacking.blogspot.in

The so called “Kiss of Love” movement started when some activists in Kochi decided to lodge their protests against the vandalization of a cafe’ in Kozhikode by BJP workers alleging “Immoral activities”. In Kolkata, on November 7, 2014, some 300 students from Javadpur and Presidency Universities also staged demonstrations in college campuses and some 50 volunteers staged protests at the gates of RSS headquarters in Delhi.

So far the movement has received mixed response. Satyani, a PHD student proclaims, “Time has come to safeguard our freedom of expression”. Whereas, Professor Amitav Gupta, JU though empathises with the cause, finds the protests silly. Prabir Mukherjee, a professor at PU finds the protests offensive and vulgar.

(Kochi to Kolkata: ‘Kiss of love’ unites students, divides teachers – See more at: http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/kolkata/kochi-to-kolkata-kiss-of-love-unites-students-divides-teachers/#sthash.uYh0ghF4.dpuf, 2014)

So, what we have is two sides crying foul, one rising concerns over encroachment of liberty in the name of moral policing and the other disgruntled over denigration of Indian values and norms by western culture. The critical question in such a scenario should be:”In the developed India that we look forward to, which side seems to occupy the prominent place?”

In reply, a case can be made out of U.S. transformation from a conservative, early 20th century nation to the techno economic giant of 21st century, equally pushing for libertarian, human rights based agenda. The present Indian youth, eager and impatient to leave their mark on the globe aren’t going to compromise with the notions of liberty and freedom to make choices for themselves.

But they need to learn to accommodate to the cultural sensitivities of common people who have been raised within security of cultural conformities. Change, doesn’t happen in a day. It’s a gradual process which takes time. At the same time, political outfits which have a knack of cracking down on people allegedly misusing their freedom need to tone their acts down and calibrate to the new social order which emphasizes on values of tolerance and openness to new ideas and alternate style of livings.

And, hopefully then we can look forward to the nation of our dreams, a nation advanced in every domain and where being modern is cherishing the treasure of Indian values as well as sustaining an open, liberal mindset.

Utkarsh Jaiswal
MBA-IT
IIIT Allahabad

Data being the most important and vulnerable asset for organizations is critical to kept secure. All the organizations are growing in terms of data they handle. From the inventory stocks to target and existing customer base, from social media content to web locks, each and every bit is adding to data to be stored and analyzed. Thus, leaving them with an only option of switching to Big Data. But, Big Data breaches will be big too, with the chances for even more serious reputational and legal damage than at present.

Big data is often characterized by 3Vs, Volume, Velocity and Variety of data. All the three attributes have their own challenges associated with them. Massive size of data is off course most prominent and coherent one. Velocity signifies both, rate at which data arrives and needs to be acted upon. Variety denotes the heterogeneous data, unstructured data and the issues related to it.The concept of Data has been highly evolved than the traditional times and so are the techniques to handle them. There has been a paradigm shift from traditional Relational databases where data was put into processor to BIG DATA where multiple processors are brought to the data. A technological shift has supported this change to happen. Platforms like Hadoop and frameworks like MapReduce and Storm. Several others technologies for real time analytics and graph computation are emerging as Hadoop has already proved unsuitable for many existing problems.
Big data has resolved several issues like processing of adhoc queries and enormously flooding data through its parallel and powerful computational frameworks .Its distribution across variant silos and ability to tackle unstructured data makes it way superior than traditional analytic techniques. These scalabilities in turn lead to several bottlenecks for the analysts to handle. Following are certain vulnerable areas of BIG DATA which might lead to challenging situations if not tackled well.

Heterogeneous Sources
End Point Input Validation is important to ensure integrity of data sources. Due to massive amount of data to be dealt, it becomes more challenging and increases the vulnerability.

Insecure Data Storage
Data being stored at thousands of nodes, secure storage ensuring Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability of stored data itself becomes challenge.

Insecure Data Processing and Computation
Untrusted computation programs can be submitted and used by the attacker to extract critical information from data sources or to manipulate the sensitive data. Several attacks like denial of service can also be initiated by the attacker.

Data Mining and Analytics leading to Privacy Breeches
Monetizing of big data needs data mining, analyzing and ultimately sharing of results. This might lead to privacy breeches, invasive marketing and disclosure of sensitive information.

Cloud Adoption
Switching to Cloud for storing enormous data proves to be a boon but at the same time it outsources the security of the owners’ critical data to a third party and hence becomes vulnerable.

Insecure Access Controls
Big data implementations include open source code leading to unrecognized back doors, intruders and default credentials. Also, authentication and access from various sources may not be secure enough.

Auto- tiering
It creates two repositories of data ‘Hot data’ and ‘Cold data’. The data which is accessed less frequently is moved to Cold Data which is lesser secure medium. This might be risky if the cold data is sensitive one.

Compliance Monitoring
Real time monitoring of compliance is a big time issue that should be taken care of due to the excessive amount of data and alerts generated by big data.

Audits
Regular audits and governance become even more necessary yet challenging due to highly distributed and unstructured nature. Timely audits in conformation with universal compliances are indispensible to ensure that the data is not yet compromised.

Big data was initially thought and designed with a concept of scalability i.e. accommodating huge volume and variety of data and responding to the queries at earliest. Security issue was not much thought of, which is lacking and need to be made scalable with the amount of data being accommodated.

Sonika Singhal
MBA-IT
IIIT Allahabad