RECENT CYBER ATTACKS IN THE WORLD

admin — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 11:09:39 +0000

Exposure of Information is directly proportional to the Cyber-crimes in the world. Cyber-attacks are the costliest attacks in the world, plays with loss in crores.
Cyber wars are started in the recent years secretly to defeat the countries with the help of technologies. India is facing 10,000 phishing attacks every day to capture the data. Major part goes to the attack of our neighbor countries that have good relationship in front of UNO.
Recent Cyber-attacks in the Indian Private Television networks
Recently, a private television networks (Jaya TV) website in TamilNadu was hacked by the Pakistani terrorist whose intention was just to threaten us that they can intrude any kind of security system. Few months ago, the same thing was happened to Zee TV by Bangladesh’s terrorist. Don’t we have protection? Don’t we have the power to prove ourselves? We have everything. Then what we don’t have? We don’t have enough awareness of what should not be done in the Internet.
Cyber Operations of other countries
In another side, every country is taking preventive measures to face the cyber-attacks. Norman Government has deployed “Operation Hangover”, an intrusion detection system with the help of a Norwegian data security firm and the shadow server foundation. Russians are practicing successful method of preventing cyber-attacks. They will never give the clue about the intrusion detection systems, because they will never actively filter the internet. As the Moscow Times notes, the Russian government is suspected of supporting similar DDOS attacks against targets in Georgia and Ukraine.
E-mail Spoofing
Collecting email id of government officials and sending those spams is now a day’s very common attack. By doing this, Officers can’t see the important mails as those mails will be in between the spam mails. Also, the cyber criminals managed to steal email IDs belong to Prime Minister’s office, Defense, external affairs, finance ministries and Intelligence agencies.
Cyber-attacks to ‘Apple’
It’s obvious that attacks are aimed to get the fame to get the attention of world. Recently Apple users faced bot malware attack. Unfortunately, these Mac attacks were not solved immediately, the attackers take control of computers and steal information they can then sell for a profit. Of course, plenty of companies like Symantec sells network intrusion detection and prevention systems. If the end user software detects any suspicious activity, it will trigger the security software. It will start analyzing the information being transferred to and from the network as a whole. By the way, malware being passed around or patterns of activity indicative of a botnet can be detected.
Last week, ESET, a Slovakian anti-virus firm, published detail successful Indian attempts to breach computers in Pakistan. I feel these attacks reduce the fame of India, Even if Indians are trying these kinds of activities. And who knows this could be an attack by another country and leave the traces of India. However, it is clearly visible that India is under spot light of Cyber Crimes.
The whole world is preparing for preventing from Cyber Crimes. We Indians should also take part in it.

Reference:

https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/idblog/page/3

Rajeev Kumar (IMS2013067)
MSCLIS
IIIT Allahabad

Crime, Privacy and Tor

admin — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 10:50:53 +0000

It was designed to serve an army, it was designed to secure privacy, it was designed for whistleblowers to be anonymous but here it is, serving the criminals and facilitating them to launch attack against countries, governments and its people. Yes I am going to talk about the online anonymity network Tor.
Tor is a network of virtual tunnel that allows individual and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. It Facilitates software developers to create new communication tools with better privacy features. Tor is used by different intelligence agencies around the globe for information gathering without leaving their traces. There are numerous known and unknown application where Tor can be used.
How it works
Tor helps in distributing user’s Internet traffic over several different places around the globe. So no single point can link to origin or destination of transaction. To create a private network pathway with Tor, the user’s software or client builds a path of encrypted connections through relays on the network. The circuit is provided one hop at a time and the following nodes knows about the nodes which are providing the data and which are receiving the data. No individual node ever knows the complete path that a data packet has taken. The user’s client software negotiates a separate set of encryption keys for each node along the circuit to ensure that no hop can trace these connections as they pass through.
Hidden services
Tor also makes it feasible for users to hide their location while offering various kind of services, such as web publishing and instant messaging server. There are number of “.onion” websites available. These services are used by activist to share confidential information with general public, some use it to share information without revealing their identity but some of those websites sites are facilitating black market. One can buy drugs, extreme form of pornography, illegal arms and ammunition with the click of a button. There are also content (Text and Multimedia) available that are more than enough to corrupt the moral of an individual toward the current form of society.
Why we need Tor
Tor serves our ever increasing need of privacy and security. It helps journalist to communicate with whistleblower, helps normal user from being tracked by websites and Internet service providers. Businesses uses Tor to research competition, Activists use Tor to anonymously report on corruption etc. Militaries use Tor to protect their communications and intelligence gathering online.
How Criminal Use Tor
Criminal uses it with very same ways but for malicious intent. They communicate with other criminals around the world without the fear of being tracked down by different Intelligence agencies. Criminals are daring to sell illegal product with the privilege of anonymity and has developed a large market place for doing things that one can’t even imagine. There are large number of “.onion” websites that are run by anonymous criminal to provide services that poses threat to normal people. One can buy or sell drugs, can hire even a hitman to kill a person and more.

How to access Tor
The simplest way to avail the services offered by Tor, is to download Tor bundle browser and you are ready to roll. There are other application like Orbot for android to access its services. For more information visit http://torproject.org.
To begin with a hidden website you can go to the following link:
http://kpvz7ki2v5agwt35.onion/wiki/index.php/Main_Page -> Hidden Wiki
So what I can infer from all this is that Technology like Tor can make it possible to raise users privacy and safety on the Internet while on the other side enable criminals to take this world down.

References:

https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28anonymity_network%29/

Pranay Singh

B'Cognizance » I Secure

RECENT CYBER ATTACKS IN THE WORLD

Crime, Privacy and Tor