Your ANDROID APPLICATIONS : Mining your profile

1.    It is common for us to hear a company promoting its phone or tablet showcasing that lakhs of android applications are available for free...and the poor(???) customer generally falls for it...so he buys the device and immediately starts exploiting the world of millions of applications on the net and the Google play store...now off course Google just does not upload a application for download once the up loader does his part of the formalities and registration...it checks under its set of QRs if the application is ok from the point of being malicious in nature or not but that does not always works....so many times android applications even in the Google play-store have been found to be suspected...now lets keep suspected apart...does the typical user even checks the terms and conditions of any application before installing?...the blind rule is JUST ACCEPT IT!!!and this goes against the user...this allows invasion to privacy...why should a company ask to access your phone contacts..your location..your system settings...your configuration settings before it allows to install it application on your device...BUT NO ONE THINKS ABOUT THIS!!!!

Back in February of this year, Google announced it was hardening its stance on Android security, unveiling an app-scanner (codenamed Bouncer) to weed out malware uploaded to Android Market (now Google Play) through automatic scanning. Since then, Google has taken more steps to protect Android users: it acquired VirusTotal back in September and in Android 4.2 Jelly Bean introduced an optional app verification feature that enables users to identify dangerous and potentially-dangerous apps on their devices, even if they downloaded them from the Web or got them from an app store other than Google Play.

How have Google’s efforts to combat Android malware been working out? Perhaps not so well. Security researchers were quickly able to analyze how Bouncer operated and find easy ways to circumvent Google Play’s automated scanning — techniques publicly available now to malware authors if they hadn’t managed to think of them on their own. Further, Xuxian Jiang of North Carolina State University has published an assessment of Jelly Bean’s app verification capability. The results? Google’s app verification service identified just over 15 percent of malware samples thrown at it from the Android Malware Genome Project

Source : http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/who-can-fight-android-malware-not-google/

2.     Mobile malware is lately becoming a organised crime with complex sophistication in terms of tracking back....and this makes the attack surface for the hacker and the black hats more big and the user more vulnerable at the same time....The most common victim is the one who looks for free applications in various heads of education...technology and not to forget the games section which is a big hit among-st all...the users love the games for which he has to pay nothing and the attacker gets a lot of attack surface to play around...and then the DO IT YOUR SELF TOOLS again add to the attack surface.

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO AVOID THIS?

- Keep your android updated: Now in this case most of the devices till 4.2.1 may not support upgrades..but then you have to keep your fingers crossed!!!

- Refrain from android applications other then google play store.STill you have to be careful...wherever possible read the Terms and Conditions before installing

-  Avoid public open wifi connections

-  Limit your greed to free applications.You may google about the application on google before you install it on your device.

Fedora 19 USB automount doesn't work : SOLVED

Having installed Fedora 19 Schrodinger's Cat recently, a problem came up that the USB that used to get auto detected in earlier versions stopped working......and could not be seen anywhere in the file manager...and the disk showed the following screen which has no USB disk.

(CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENLARGE)

But the good thing is that on doing LSUSB at the terminal it was being shown as follows :

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 4033:0042 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 4051:0030 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 3d4b:0008 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1f6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0f6d:081b Logitech, Inc. Webcam C310
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0c61:4d0f Primax Electronics, Ltd HP Optical Mouse
Bus 002 Device 005: ID 03f0:5201 Sandisk 

so mounted it the terminal way..

make a directory in home by the name of usb

mkdir usb

and

at the terminal type lsblk that will give you where to mount.In my case it is sdc1. My output comes as follows :

NAME            MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda               8:0    0 931.5G  0 disk 
├─sda1            8:1    0 488.3G  0 part 
└─sda2            8:2    0 443.2G  0 part 
sdb               8:16   0 465.8G  0 disk 
├─sdb1            8:17   0   100M  0 part 
├─sdb2            8:18   0   500M  0 part /boot
└─sdb3            8:19   0 465.2G  0 part 
  ├─fedora-swap 253:0    0   5.8G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
  ├─fedora-root 253:1    0    50G  0 lvm  /
  └─fedora-home 253:2    0 409.4G  0 lvm  /home
sdc               8:32   1    30G  0 disk 
└─sdc1            8:33   1    30G  0 part /home/kalama/usb
sr0              11:0    1  1024M  0 rom 

now at the terminal simply type

mount -t vfat /dev/sdc1 /home/kalama/usb/


thats it ..now it will start showing when you do df -h as shown below :

[root@localhost ~]# df -h
Filesystem               Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/fedora-root   50G  4.8G   42G  11% /
devtmpfs                 2.9G     0  2.9G   0% /dev
tmpfs                    2.9G  664K  2.9G   1% /dev/shm
tmpfs                    2.9G  968K  2.9G   1% /run
tmpfs                    2.9G     0  2.9G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs                    2.9G   36K  2.9G   1% /tmp
/dev/sdb2                477M  117M  331M  27% /boot
/dev/mapper/fedora-home  403G  173M  383G   1% /home
/dev/sdc1                 30G   16G   15G  53% /home/kalama/usb

Is PORT SCANNING legal in INDIA?

1.   The IT security guys have so much to experiment and learn vide unending open source information and tools available on the net.Be it BACKTRACK or Wireshark or Nmap or nessus or Canvas(not opensource) or a web scanner like Acunetix or Arachini and the list is unending....there is lots to do...but do we actually know that simply running a port scan on the internet is a crime in other parts of the world?

2.   In countries like Australia,UK , port scanning is recognized as a "potential attempt" to infringe on a system and that's a simple truth....no body would run such tools openly available without intent. Yess!!!...the intent can be educating self but the other side can be bad intent and no one can prove whats the intent inside the person's mind.It may change the moment he realizes he/she is caught.In the United States there is no need to prove intent and port scanning is considered illegal.So even installation of such tools is a crime.So if a naive script kiddie from India goes with his laptop to US with a virtual box machine holding a OS with a port scanner...he is a cyber criminal the moment he lands in the US.

3.   Today we in India do not have straight and clear laws defining whether running such tools or installation is a crime or not coz the whole thing is COMPLEX.The compliance laws across countries vary and that too drastically...it may be acceptable in a country like India and it may be serious offence in US.So seeing from the current state of affairs in India,it does not look like if a day will be near when such stringent guidelines exist in India to restrict all these uses and installations...or let it be restricted to professionals only.....but then who will define a Cyber Security Professional....CDAC or CEH or some other such agency....these institutes can be a critical node in identifying and certifying cyber security professionals to measure and endorse the intent...but at the end of the day we all are humans...and we know that "too err is human"....so a agency certified person finally has himself to decide whether he uses a black hat or a white hat!!!! :-)

4.   Meanwhile students and IT security enthusiasts should take care of running such tools on the internet coz these are serious tools who can break into some one's privacy...and if the victim gets serious after you...things will be bad enough to land you behind bars...so the best place to experiment with such tools is a virtual environment that can be available vide Virtual box or vmware etc....Security guys and enthus should be familiar with the excellent Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual (OSSTMM), which provides best practices for these situations.

PLEASE TAKE CARE TO RUN THE CYBER SECURITY TOOLS BEFORE THE LAW STARTS RUNNING AFTER YOU

XP still Continues though "eXPired"

1.    XP has now got the authorized prefix and suffix to get renamed as "eXPired" since it has been now officially announced by Microsoft as discontinued and has advised XP and Office 2003 users to migrate to Windows 7 and Office 2010 and thus systems are left vulnerable to new forms of malware. No further support to XP...no patches to update...no updates by Microsoft.....but certainly it will take time for XP to get disowned by more then a decade old loyal user population most of whom made their first PC experience with a XP machine...for a home guy who surfs net...it will be difficult to make him/her understand about how vulnerable he/she is now....actually very difficult.

2.    But what about the corporates and govt sector offices? I am sure private sector will make a fast change since it may adversely effect their business model in case of a undesired info leakage or a hack!!!Only recently I made a visit to a post office in Delhi for doing a speed post...wherein the dedicated  loyal postmaster was using a xp machine connected to Internet.I informally asked him about any upgrades in OS planned in their department to which he replied confidently that it's not required since it is working fine.Today the Indian postal department is slowly getting online.Today thanks to vision implementation of the government(though late) that we are able to locate the movement of a speed post letter...what time it was opened..whats the location and when it got delivered...etc etc..but all this can go waste and get a setback if the backbone nodes are not updated and monitored....more so if the staff handling all the machines are low on security aspect.

3.   Well...this postal department is one of the examples cited here since I just interacted with one of them today...but the risk stakes are high when we see this at national level...all the online-governance machines located in remote areas...have they been ensured removed of XP?....if it has not been done....this can be just on the lines of zero day exploits...in this case there must be millions of machines thrown open to hacking....and invasion to classified information.

NULL MEET: Open Source Security Testing & OSSTMM

1.    NULL,Delhi chapter organised this wonderful meet with the OSSTMM Guys incl  Joerg Simon and Fabian Affolter...well...at the time of registration I never knew what's OSSTMM but then we have google to answer that and after reading about OSSTMM....its a great way to broaden your horizons of security domain....It stands for "Open Source Security Testing Methodology Manual" ie OSSTMM...few pics from the meet

2.    More about OSSTMM at the following links :

www.osstmm.org/

https://www.facebook.com/OSSTMM

3.    Thanks to the delhi NULL chapter moderators Sandeep and Vaibhav for arranging the meet and great interaction....

Best IT SECURITY INFO & NEWS SItes

1.         IT Security enthusiasts guys/girls always keep looking forwards to discovering new sites that keep them enriched with latest happenings in the buzzing IT SECURITY world...I am listing out a list of sites that I keep abuzz with.These are not necessarily in the order of my preference or have any kind of ratings or ranking....but a whole lot of enriching info is available for every cyber security guy!!!

http://www.schneier.com/

http://thehackernews.com/

https://www.privacyrights.org/

https://www.owasp.org is specific to web application security subjects

http://www.itsecurity.com/

http://technet.microsoft.com has more of MS related aspects

http://csrc.nist.gov/

http://www.sans.org/

http://www.securityfocus.com/ : by Symantec

http://www.cert.org/

http://www.scmagazine.com/

http://www.securityweek.com/

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/

http://www.darkreading.com/

....surf few of them and enrich your self!!!!all the best

Treat your E-Mail address classified : ADVISORY

1.    Do you know that simply your E-MAIL disclosure to a person with malicious intent can be a key to disclosing your E-mail content and other personal attributes of life?...I mean it can invade your privacy...and just for info this is an active organised crime in the cyber world.

2.   What is the most important first thing that a hacker desires to know?....and the answer is the IP Address of the victim..and all it takes to know the IP address is to send a dummy mail at the victims id.. that's it....strange it may sound but there are so many websites offering you free solutions on how to get not only the IP address but also the browser and OS system details of the victim.One of the leading sites offering a free solution is SPYPIG...this site facilitates to let you know when your email has been read by the recipient! ...this happens in form of a intimation by SPYPIG as and when the e-mail is read by the recipient.

3.   Now some thing about SpyPig ....is a simple email tracking system that sends you a notification by email when the recipient opens your message.It works with virtually all modern email programs: Outlook, Eudora, Yahoo Email, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Email and many others.In addition to the notification it actually sends you additional but undesired details also which can be exploited by malicious intent person.Thde details that can be used and exploited are shown here in the screen shot below in one test mail....

Red Encircled are the Critical Info

4.     But sadly,the recipient will never know of the fact that he is being tracked and so much of critical info has already swapped hands with unknown guys...I mean the OS,the browser with their respective versions etc....so in the state today the following preventions can be taken to avoid such a hijack :

-           Avoid opening E-mails from unknown sources

-      Disable Image display by default in E-Mail settings.This is important because this works on the funda of a hidden script in the image sent along with the mail.So if you disable the images display by default,it is unlikely that this will be executed.

-           Avoid sharing and disclosing your E-Mail addresses openly.

5.     To know about spypig visit : http://www.spypig.com

"Terms & Conditions Apply" : Bon Voyage to your Privacy

1.   How many of you actually read the complete word set of "Terms and Conditions" of an application like Chrome browser ,Facebook or some thing like WhatsApp,Truecaller etc.....m sure no one hardly has time for that....ok...just for info please read the excerpt below :

Google's terms of service, for instance, clocks in at 1,711 words, according to an AFP count, not including a separate 2,382-word privacy policy that is still about 1,000 words shorter than the Google Chrome browser policy

Facebook's terms of service clocks in at 4525 words....(I did a word count with a libre office)

WhatsApp terms of service clocks in at 6549 words....(I did a word count with a libre office for this too :-)

2.    So at the above rate for a typical Internet user who installs the regular OS,Word ,PDF,VLC, it would take about 200 hours the equivalent of about one full month of work a year to fully read all the terms and conditions attached to his or her favorite websites.Will any person on earth do it?Now think over the fact that why would a company legally bind every user with thousand of words of legal agreement...what could be the motive...the motive of any company on the web is not just to save its own credibility and ass but the real motive is mining data...that's why most of it is free...why would chrome be free or for that matter why so many applications are free?...I am not trying to demean the OPENSOURCE community here who are doing a great job and I am a strict FOSS for that matter...but I would like to focus on other applications like WhatsApp,Truecaller...and so many uncountable Android,Gaba,Windows mobile applications etc....

3.   A simple click by you on Accepting the Terms and Conditions of the the application company allows your consent to online lives being archived, shared with third parties or passed on to government agencies without notice....and that's a very very serious privacy breach today when we know that in another about 4-5 years to come when our digital dependence would be like never before...this can mean havoc....for example a school student who has a home computer based on pirated or for this matter even genuine OS with loads of software's with separate set of terms and conditions.....will have his/her literally whole life profile including his FB posts,his/her preferences,his phone calls,his phone contacts,audio recordings,photographs,his/her secrets of life and anything that can be his/her privacy attribute known to the third parties with whom he has no concern...and these third parties will have their ways and means to effect his/her life in so many ways then....!!!!!

Keep Changing Your Antivirus : CRUDE but EFFECTIVE Solution to curb Virus menace

1.    We all understand the importance of anti virus today.From a naive user point of view, a user can go for the cheapest of the lot or may be if some one is worried enough he would go for the costliest one....but does that matter in an overall context? I mean w.r.t to the serious business model that this antivirus corporate sector has emerged like....lets see it here down below that brings out the country association of each leading antivirus company :

AVG                                                        :  Czech Republic

Kaspersky                                                :  Russia

Avast                                                        :  Czech Republic

Norton Symantec                                      :  U.S

Avira                                                         :  Germany

E-Set                                                        :  Slovakia

F-Secure                                                   : Finland

McAfee                                                     : U.S

MSE(Microsoft Software Essentials)          :  U.S

Panda                                                        :Spain

2.   Sadly we see,there are no Indian companies in this short list.Besides these,if we get specific to India we can quote two companies viz : Quick-heal and K7 Computing..well....that's not the point that I am here to share....the thing to note here is that all these leading companies have got a affiliation with some other country and none is Indian.So when we blindly load a antivirus or a internet security suite in our systems just on faith and word of mouth publicity from peers and friends...are we doing the right thing ? Do we know what is running in the background ? In the name of uploading our dumps what actually goes to their servers? What information does it contain?How does that company identify a virus or a malware?what's the logic that finds a virus?...all these questions are critical because this all is happening in our own machines.....but most of us hardly bother about all this...coz we have faith!!! :-)...and also because there are no standards existing for defining a QR for a antivirus....there is none to cross check what's being cooked?

3.  Besides having a question mark  on the privacy issues...lets think about the logic being applied or the signatures being released to thwart the known threats....but do we know that more then the known virus list it is the ZERO DAY threats that are getting serious by the day....off-course few bright companies are trying to check that by working on behavioral aspects of a virus or a suspected file...but that has it's set of constraints and is often limited in detecting....so whats the solution.....i recommend using all trial versions for a month each of all leading companies that will pass your one year and then format your windows PC and then start again.....a cheap...crude method of using the best without spending a penny!!!!!!!!!!!!

4.   By the way,just for info...virus detection by various companies have their own speeds...a company like kaspersky may be able to detect a virus soon and another company may detect it later or may not even at times detect one....and this time lag of detection is critical to all users!!!!!a second of compromise is enough on your PC with loads of bytes to upload in a matter of a seconds!!!

Comments invited!!!!

Cyber Security Tips for Home Users

Maximum percentage of internet users will remain the naive Home users and it is this major percentage that needs to be acquainted with the basic cyber security hygiene. This presentation will equip the basic user with a small set of skills to be slightly better on handling security front on their respective PCs.

  Cyber Security Tips for Home Users