See:
Tools for Recognizing Useful Signals of Trustworthiness (TRUST) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA)

U.S. Spooks Want a System That Automatically Gauges Who Can Be Trusted

The search engine can be accessed for free from:
www.data64.cc

The search engine searches through a database of websites that is compiled and updated by subject experts. This ensures that users get the most relevant information in the fields of:

1. cyber crime
2. cyber crime investigation
3. cyber forensics
4. computer security

The suspects created and distributed Harada (a Trojan horse infecting users of the Winny P2P file-sharing network). The Trojan displayed images of popular animation characters while wiping MP3 and movie files.

Under Japanese Law, it is not illegal to write computer viruses and hence the suspects are being charged for copyright violation on the grounds that cartoon graphics were used without permission in the Trojan.

This is believed to be the first arrest in Japan of a virus writer.

Harada is believed to be related to the Pirlames Trojan horse (http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2007/02/pirlames.html)

PS: Virus writers and distributors are punishable in India with fines and imprisonment terms under the Information Technology Act.

Hosted by Asian School of Cyber Laws, CyberAttack 2008 is aimed at knowledge sharing amongst cyber crime investigators and computer emergency response professionals.

The conference will focus on:

1. latest trends in cyber crimes
2. best practices for cyber crime investigation
3. best practices for cyber forensics.

Original papers are invited from professionals. Authors of short listed Papers will have the option to present the paper in person or in absentia. All short listed Papers will be published in the conference proceedings.

Further information can be obtained from:

www.cyberattack.in

Asian School of Cyber Laws is the pioneer in education and research in cyber law and cyber crime investigation in India. We have assisted the Government of India in framing rules and regulations under the Information Technology Act. We work closely with Governments and law enforcement agencies around the world in the fields of cyber crime investigation and cyber forensics.

Books are available in the following categories:
1. Forensics
2. Linux Security
3. Unix Security
4. Windows Security
5. Wireless Security
6. Firewalls

Additionally you can also subscribe to relevant magazines and buy security related software and electronics.

Husband spying on wife among secrets revealed by ‘unshredder’ chewing through East German secret-police files

January 20, 2008

Brett Popplewell
 
Nineteen years ago, as the Berlin Wall crumbled and democracy swept through communist East Germany, STASI agents – members of the secret police – worked feverishly to destroy millions of top-secret documents in an effort to keep them from Western eyes.

Attempting to shred some 45 million items as quickly as possible, the agents fed page after page into shredding machines. The equipment quickly jammed, leaving the agents to tear up the materials by hand and throw them into garbage bags meant to be incinerated.

But with East Germany quickly falling into the hands of the west, the agents were stopped before they could burn the shreds. Some 600 million pieces in 16,000 bags became the property of the current German government. They have remained, for the most part, in that state.

Then, in May 2007, the German government revealed the world’s most sophisticated pattern-recognition machine, the $8.5 million dollar (U.S.) E-Puzzler, which can digitally put back together even the most finely shredded papers.

Developed in Berlin by the Fraunhofer Institute of Production Facilities and Construction Technology, the E-puzzler is a computerized conveyor belt that runs shards of shredded and torn paper through a digital scanner.

Scanning up to 10,000 shreds at once, the machine links them together by their colour, typeface, outline, shape and texture – not unlike how the average human might try to piece together a puzzle. The machine then displays a digital image of the original document on a computer screen.

“The task to automatically reconstruct 16,250 bags full of torn documents using a technical system . . . presents an enormous technological challenge,” says Bertram Nickolay, the lead inventor of the machine.

During the Cold War, East Germany’s Ministry for State Security – STASI – was regarded as one of the most formidable secret police forces of its day. Using a vast network of civilian informants, the STASI kept files on up to 6 million of East Germany’s 16 million citizens through an estimated 400,000 informants from all walks of life.

For decades, neighbours spied on neighbours, priests spied on their flocks, husbands spied on their wives and even children spied on their parents. They reported their discoveries to the 90,000 STASI agents keeping tabs on the population.

Prior to the creation of the E-puzzler, a team of 15 Germans had laboriously been putting the pieces together by hand. But they managed to rebuild only 10,000 documents from 300 bags during 12 years. The German government estimated it would take a further 600 to 800 years to finish the job.

But having uncovered heartbreaking stories of espionage – like that of Vera Lengsfeld, a 54-year old German politician who was shocked to learn she had been spied on by her husband for 11 years – the German public demanded the files be put together more quickly. An estimated 3.4 million Germans have officially requested to see the information the STASI gathered on them.

With the E-puzzler, Nickolay says the government will be able to un-shred the remaining documents by 2013.

Nickolay acknowledges his machine’s importance in helping millions of Germans to piece together their former lives. But says his machine is even more significant to the rest of the world.

In addition to piecing together shreds of paper, the machine has been used by Chinese archaeologists to reconstruct smashed Terracotta warriors found in the tomb of Emperor Qin. And the equipment has deciphered barely-legible lists of Nazi concentration camp victims.

There is only one E-puzzler in operation, but Nickolay’s team has received interest from other former Eastern Bloc countries looking for a way to get at their own state secrets of the past.

“It’s no longer safe to shred a document,” Nickolay says. “The only safe way to destroy something is by burning it.”

I recently came across some nice and easy to implement Ajax codes.

Swazz Javascript Calender
http://calendar.swazz.org/

Nice looking popup window to display a webpage / website
http://orangoo.com/labs/GreyBox/

Star rating bar allowing users to rate a webpage etc
http://www.masugadesign.com/the-lab/scripts/unobtrusive-ajax-star-rating-bar/

FrogJS Javascript Image Gallery
http://www.puidokas.com/portfolio/frogjs/

Enables draging of content on a webpage using an AJAX script
http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/index.html?showDownload=true&whichScript=dragable-content

AJAX code for sorting tables automatically or manually by moving rows
http://friedcellcollective.net/js/SortedTable/index.html

Table row striping, column sorting, column resizing and cell editing
http://www.millstream.com.au/upload/code/tablekit/

Simple Ajax Chat Room
http://www.linuxuser.at/index.php?title=Most_Simple_Ajax_Chat_Ever

Ajax navigation system
http://javascript.internet.com/ajax/ajax-navigation.html

Username availability checker
http://javascriptsource.com/ajax/check-username-signup.html

Windows (in its myriad variations) is a great set of operating systems (except maybe Windows Millennium Edition). Its ease of use and massive popularity also makes it the most (successfully) attacked.

Linux (with its wide range of flavors) is a great open source choice – saves you money and gives you a great and secure product. But after years of working with different operating systems, I have come to one conclusion – BSD rocks!!

BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) is the name of distributions of source code from the University of California, Berkeley, which were originally extensions to AT&T’s Research UNIX operating system.

BSD comes in many flavors, notably -

FreeBSD – currently the most popular version, it is easy to use and very high on performance. (btw Yahoo runs on FreeBSD)

NetBSD is considered a particularly good choice for running on old non-Intel hardware. Its main aim is maximum portability. It runs on almost everything – from palmtops to large servers.

OpenBSD is the popular choice for aims for banks, stock exchanges and Government departments. Its core guiding principle is code purity – derived from a brilliant combination of open source and rigorous code reviews.

As of 27th September 2007 – yes!

A malicious hacker can misuse Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) to redirect a copy of all your incoming emails to his account! CSRF is also referred to as “one click attack” or “session riding”.

[Before you read any further please understand gmail filters by logging into your gmail account and going to Settings – Filters.]

CSRF is a malicious attack that transmits unauthorized commands to a website from a trusted user. Lets take a simple example to understand this:

1. Pooja is checking her email on a very safe computer (totally patched, fire-walled, with the latest updated antivirus etc etc) using a very safe browser.
2. Because she is logged in to gmail, the gmail authentication cookie is present on her machine.
3. She receives an email from Priyanka containing a really funny joke. The email contains a link to a site which promises her lots more funny stuff. She clicks on the link and is very happy with the site that opens up.
4. What she does not realize is that this joke site has forged a POST request to the gmail “Create Filter” wizard. This creates a filter that forwards a copy of all emails coming into Pooja’s account to Priyanka!
5. Gmail accepts the request to create the filter because the genuine gmail account holder (Pooja) is authenticated and logged in at the moment and her session cookie is passed along with the forged request.
6. This new gmail filter will keep stealing Pooja’s emails till she manually checks her filters and realizes that there is an unauthorized one.

I carried out a small experiment wherein I requested for a filter to forward all emails to a particular account. On analyzing the data trasnfer between my browser and gmail (using Tamper Data extension for Firefox) I found that the relevant GET parameter is cf2_email.

See the following for more information on this -

Many thanks to Giorgio Maone for his post on this issue. As Georgio says – this exploit is “Very clever and very dangerous.”

I recently tried out DriveSentry, a personal data firewall that works on a PC as well as a removable drive.

According to DriveSentry.com…..”DriveSentry complements your existing anti-virus tool by detecting threats to your system using a patent-pending technology. DriveSentry is an intelligent firewall for your drives that works by allowing only applications that you authorize to write to your files. An example is that you can grant access to Microsoft Word to write to a document, but a virus attempting to do the same would trigger a warning”.

The most interesting claim made by the company is that DriveSentry can be used to “enhance your conventional anti-virus software by protecting against zero day attacks. If DriveSentry can actually achieve this, then it would solve a lot of security issues.

Test on WinXP machine

I performed a simple test to try out DriveSentry on my local machine. This test was performed on a Win XP SP2 machine running an updated AVG antivirus.

1. First I wrote a simple js code that can modify the hosts file of a Windows machine.

2. When I ran this js file, the AVG antivirus did not give any alert. The code changed my hosts file!

3. I then installed DriveSentry on my machine and configured it to protect the c:\\windows\\system32\\drivers\\etc\\ folder.

4. I then again ran the js code. DriveSentry blocked it and showed a medium risk level.

5. However the “online advice” option recommended that I “ALLOW write access“.

Conclusion: Drive Sentry seems to have a lot of potential. The product is still in beta so there are lots of improvements expected. The “online advice” system will to grow with the user base. The database of user “advice” is currently too small to trust.