Ubuntu 12.10 @ SPYING

1.   What happens when someone you trust eyes closed,some you promote amongst ur friends is labeled a SPYWARE...or a Spying agent... that's what was felt by millions of UBUNTU followers and fans.I read about this two days back at ZDNET. The news doing the rounds goes like this :

Richard M. Stallman,creator of the Gnu General Public License (GPL) and the Free Software Foundation has announced that as far as he's concerned, Ubuntu contains spyware and that Linux supporters should shun Ubuntu for spying.

Specifically, Richard M. Stallman hates that Ubuntu 12.10 incorporated Amazon search into its default search function. So, if you searched for say "CISSP." you'd get results from both your PC and Amazon. When it was introduced, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, defended this change by saying Ubuntu wasn't going to incorporate ads into the operating system, which Microsoft has done with Windows 8, and that no personalized data would be sent to Amazon.

2.   You need to re-read this yellow highlighted text above to exactly understand what goes on behind the scenes when you actually search for some string in your PC operating on UBUNTU connected to Internet.After the millions of immediate disapproves by the user community,it was announced by UBUNTU that now on Users of the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 will be able to turn off a controversial 'shopping lens' feature that displays Amazon-stocked products when the user performs a unified local and online search....so the spying becomes optional....:-)

3.   What can be the need of a responsible OS community like UBUNTU to get into all this....if its my view it is not intentional for the purpose of spying.....but it could have been designed in the name of giving the user better results and experience!!!!!Jono Bacon, Canonical's community manager flatly states, "This is FUD" ie "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD)...now yess!!so it seems to be....

4.   All said and done..UBUNTU is doing a wonderful job and provisioning one of the best OS free editions for users like us who wish not to pay to WINDOWS and believe in FREE SOFTWAREs :-)

CYBER SECURITY COURSES IN INDIA

1. Most of the guys interested in cyber security keep looking and searching for Cyber Security Courses on the web and that included me too till some time back.So though I started like any body would do ie google and Bing around the web....so I found out so many courses being offered by so many unknown unheard institutions....but the best of what are accredited to some university and of some good valuable repute here in India are discussed in brief down along with the links.You can click on the course and u will be taken to the respective site for full details :


CDAC : Offers the following courses vide elearn :

C-DAC's Course On Cyber Security [CCCS] at http://elearn.cdac.in/eSikshak/help/English/eSikshak/cccs.htm

C-DAC Certified Cyber Security Professional ( CCCSP ) at http://elearn.cdac.in/eSikshak/help/English/eSikshak/CCCSP.html

Being from CDAC,these courses are valid in all govt organisations and public sectors.

GUJRAT FORENSIC SCIENCES UNIVERSITY AT http://www.gfsu.edu.in/institute_of_forensic_science.php offers following courses online :

GFSU CERTIFIED CYBER CRIME INVESTIGATOR
GFSU CERTIFIED CELLPHONE FORENSIC PROFESSIONAL
GFSU CERTIFIED COMPUTER FORENSIC EXPERT
GFSU CERTIFIED CYBER SECURITY EXPERT
PG CERTIFICATE DIPLOMA IN CYBER LAW
PG CERTIFICATE DIPLOMA IN IPR

Details about the courses offered at http://www.gfsu.edu.in/pdf/online_certificate_course.pdf

ASCL(ASIAN SCHOOL OF CYBER LAWS) : The Website is at http://www.asianlaws.org/ .The following courses are offered in cyber domain including security :

Advanced Executive Program in Cyber Security AT http://www.asianlaws.org/cyber_security.php#.UMC5Zn_SFI0

Advanced Executive Program in Cyber Security, Audit & Compliance AT http://www.asianlaws.org/csac.php#.UMC5mX_SFI0

DIPLOMA IN CYBER LAW AT http://www.asianlaws.org/glc.php#.UMC353_SFI0

DIPLOMA IN CYBER LAW(INTERNATIONAL) AT http://www.asianlaws.org/dcl.php#.UMC4Cn_SFI0

PG IN CYBER LAW AT http://www.asianlaws.org/pgpcl.php#.UMC4LX_SFI0

CYBER LAW FOR POLICE OFFICERS AT http://www.asianlaws.org/police.php#.UMC4TX_SFI0

PG Program in Cyber Crime Prosecution & Defence AT http://www.asianlaws.org/ccpd.php#.UMC4fH_SFI0

Advanced Program in International Cyber Laws AT http://www.asianlaws.org/icl.php#.UMC4p3_SFI0

ASCL Certified Cyber Crime Investigator AT http://www.asianlaws.org/cci.php#.UMC4xn_SFI0

ASCL Certified Digital Evidence Analyst AT http://www.asianlaws.org/dea.php#.UMC46n_SFI0

ASCL Certified Digital Forensic Investigator AT http://www.asianlaws.org/dfi.php#.UMC5JH_SFI2

Advanced Executive Program in IT Act Audit & Compliance AT http://www.asianlaws.org/audit.php#.UMC5RH_SFI0

DATA64 website at http://www.data64.in/index.php#.UMC54X_SFI0 offers a range of courses similar to ASCL as mentioned above.

IMT,GHAZIABAD.Details at http://www.imtcdl.ac.in/. The following courses are offered in cyber domain including security :

ONE YEAR PG DIPLOMA IN CYBER SECURITY at http://www.imtcdl.ac.in/opgdcs_about.htm

TWO YEAR MS IN CYBER LAW & SECURITY at http://www.imtcdl.ac.in/mscs_about.htm

IGNOU OFFERS Post Graduate Diploma in Information Security (PGDIS) at http://www.ignou.ac.in/ignou/aboutignou/school/sovet/programmes/detail/428/2

ANKIT FADIA Certified Ethical Hacker (AFCEH) AT http://www.ankitfadia.in/afceh.html

1 Gigabit Per Second : The dream comes to Kochi,INDIA

1.    Are you happy surfing Internet speeds at 2 Mbps and around....and have you read about speeds of 1Gbps in future.....if yesss....its time to realize that this future that we keep reading and dreaming about has reached us...ie our desktops!!!....

2.  Astonishing as any one may find that when I read about the 1 Gigabit per second connectivity made available to the people of Kansas City in the US of A, I never imagined that the same day around it will be some where offered in India too...and where else but KOCHI..........

3.  Startup Village at Kochi joined the 1 Gig speed club by becoming the second place in the world to experience lightning fast 1Gbps internet connection. Chief Minister Shri Oommen Chandy formally introduced the facility on November 17.Guys in the state of Kerala can now make the most of upload speeds that are 1000 times that of Broadband and download speeds 100 times as fast.This is a wow moment for the Kochi residents....upload and download tons in minutes and seconds :-)

4.    Congrats Kochi guys!!!!!

How to find if Python is installed in Linux ?

I was recently playing with Matriux Krypton tool chaosmap....but was unable to use this tool for some error that kept popping up...so I though if at all the PYTHON is installed or not?......the way to check this is to go to the terminal and write :

python -V

and u should see like  : Python 2.6.6

                                         (click on the image to enlarge)

The power of ALGORITHMS : Writing Articles/Reports/News!!!

1.  We all are pretty aware that whatever works on the net ,cyberspace web,applications is all backed by many codes and algos running in the background..,,it is these algorithms and codes that actually decide how things happen at the front end ie the user interface.Designed by coders and programmers these algorithms perform herculean tasks in all our routine IT activities...now for all those of us who work in offices and corporate ....we generally keep coming across compiling and analysing reports on various aspects ,be it the views...the summary...the monthly/quarterly feedback... the main article for some journal....or some regular feed etc.So now making these reports and feedbacks etc actually requires manual intervention...and the quality of these reports are proportional to the amount of quality work man hours that have gone into making it....but what if these manual intervention is replaced by intelligent algorithms...ie the reports being compiled are made out of algorithms???

2.   This is what has happened at Narrative Science,a company that trains computers to write news stories...yes you heard it write!!! "Trains computers to write News Stories".The first story that I read about this is available here.The brief points from this story goes like these :

     -  Every 30 seconds or so, the algorithmic bull pen of Narrative Science, a 30-person company occupying a large room on the fringes of the Chicago Loop, extrudes a story whose very byline is a question of philosophical inquiry.

  - Kristian Hammond is the CTO and co-founder of Narrative Science.According to Hammond, these stories are only the first step toward what will eventually become a news universe dominated by computer-generated stories....(amazing amazing future!!!!:-)

   - If one wishes to know the percentage of news that would be written by computers in 15 years.......according to Hammond is going to be more then 90%

3.   So guys the above example is for the news world...where else we can think? Can it compile Intelligence reports for the FBI and our CID based on inputs from so many sources....Off course this is being handled manually as on date....but imagining a intel report compiled by a algorithm is a serious contender for making a permanent place in such agencies.Well...this is one imagination...how about demographic repots...election reports...infact the list is endless.....

4.    Thanks http://www.wired.com

ESSPEE : eth0 issue in Installation

1.   First thing first ...what's ESSPEE.So friends who are aware of whats Backtrack R3....ESSPEE is a derivative of BackTrack 5, based on Ubuntu 12.04. Designed for users who wish to use only free software. It is packed with featured security tools with stable configurations....and now for those of you who wish to know the expanded form of ESSPEE ...its EXTREME SECURITY SCANNING PENETRATION TESTING & EXPLOITATION ENVIRONMENT.....:-)

2.   So after downloading this from  here...and after installing I came across a small issue of eth0 NIC not being detected unlike regularly where it gets detected automatically vide a DHCP config.So the answer is a small tweak that is required while selecting the Mac address of the eth0 as shown in the screen shot below :

(Click on the image to ENLARGE)

3.    That's it....and now ur internet will be on with network adapter configured to NAT....

Detecting a MALICIOUS PDF:PDFid @ BACKTRACK 5 R3

Here is the Screen cast of the past link on "Detecting a MALICIOUS PDF:PDFid @ BACKTRACK 5 R3"

Detecting a MALICIOUS PDF:PDFid @ BACKTRACK 5 R3

1.    Adobe, who gave us the the ever comfortable PDF..thats the "Portable Document Format" in the early 1990's never thought like how this can become a security threat by the simple action of opening it only....yess!!!this post will give a small insight of how things really work behind the scene in execution of a malicious PDF....

2.  So first of all...how a PDF becomes a malicious document?The answer to this question is simple embedding of a JAVA SCRIPT, that is not seen but only executed once a PDF is opened....no antivirus will be able to identify of what malicious thing lies behind a normal PDF that u and me use daily...so if u scan a malicious PDF with your Antivirus,it is veri unlikely to be caught....how do we know then whether a PDF is malicious or not?...thats what this post shows here....I came across a tool known as PDFid in the BACKTRACK R3 that I was running in Virtual Box.

3.   Few lines about the tool....this was developed by Didier Stevens who blogs at http://blog.didierstevens.com/.So this helps us to differentiate between PDF Documents that could be malicious and those that are unlikely to be....The tool is based on the fact that that a  typical PDF File comprises of header, objects, cross-reference table (to locate objects), and trailer.So , if there is a tool that can find out if any one of them is available in this PDF...things can become easier...so like for example...if a PDF that has no purpose of embedding or holding a JS inside it,then a eye brow raise is certain as to why should it be there....so PDFid tool comes to rescue us out of this question...First the typical structure of a PDF with its one line explanation is given below :

“/OpenAction” and “/AA” (Additional Action) specifies the script or action to run automatically.

 “/Names”, “/AcroForm”, “/Action” can also specify and launch scripts or actions.

“/JavaScript” specifies JavaScript to run.

 “/GoTo*” changes the view to a specified destination within the PDF or in another PDF file.

 “/Launch” launches a program or opens a document.

“/URI” accesses a resource by its URL.

“/SubmitForm” and “/GoToR” can send data to URL.

“/RichMedia” can be used to embed Flash in PDF.

“/ObjStm” can hide objects inside an Object Stream.

4. So now I have set up a VB machine running BTR3 that would run this tool and find out if the PDF that I have analyzed is malicious or not? These are the screen shots showing a step by step scene of how u do it....

(Click on the Image to ENLARGE)

(Click on the Image to ENLARGE)

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(Click on the Image to ENLARGE)

5.   So the last screen shows the final result...for those of you who find this little complicated I will upload a video cast of this soon....

6.   Thanks http://blog.didierstevens.com and http://zeltser.com

Upgrading Backtrack R2 to R3 : Distribution Upgrade

Single line terminal command from the BT Terminal to upgrade your Backtrack Dist is

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

McAfee : Runs on Windows/Linux and from Police

1.    Strange is the heading and so is the story....according to the news doing the rounds in cyber space.Anti-virus software pioneer John McAfee says he is moving every four hours to avoid Belizean police who wants to question him about the murder of his neighbor, a fellow American....how true or untrue is this ...m no one to comment....but being an ardent McAfee user for long on my various VMs....I would like to wish him the best.....more on the story that I read from is available here.....