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Separating Fact from Fiction – The realities of Cyber War
By Don Eijndhoven
Cyber War. Two words that you’ll have heard in the news a few times by now. You’ll have heard it more and more over the last year or so. Maybe two or three years if you’ve been halfway interested or happened to be browsing on IT websites that cover cyber warfare. Especially if you’re living in the US, you’ll have heard some pretty fear-inducing stories. And not by just anybody; Richard Clarke himself has said that a Cyber War is the next big threat to national security. He was, of course, referring to the national security of the US, but his critique certainly holds water for other modernized nations. What may be surprising is that he was absolutely right, even though he may be understood poorly.

Multifactor Authentication – A Requirement for the 21st Century
By Robert Keeler
Logon credentials as the only method of granting access to today’s valuable data is far from an acceptable 21st century solution. There is no doubt that the lack of serious authentication for the last decade has created much of the opportunity for the theft of information which has led to identity theft becoming an epidemic. Other than granting initial access, there is no monitoring of a user’s true identity during transaction processing online. There is no forced logout when the user has completed their task. There is no security when Man-in-the-middle attacks can easily penetrate the weaknesses of simple logon credentials being the primary access control to vasts amounts of data.

Regulatory Compliance under the Indian Cyber Laws
by Sagar Rahurkar
The Information Technology Act, 2000 (IT Act) is the primary law in India governing “cyberspace”. It is in force from 17th October, 2000 and IT (amended) Act, 2008 is in force from 27th October, 2009 making significant changes in the original Act. Amendments for the first times have introduced the concept of “Regulatory compliance” under the law for the protection of “Sensitive personal information”.

Ride the Dragon: Testing the Desktop by adopting criminal tools and strategies
by Stefano MacGalia
A usual Pen Testing engagement limits its perimeter of action to exploit specific vulnerabilities identified during phases and, by collecting the results, it ends with a positive or negative occurrence that will be included in the final report by the tester.
This means that, by the Customer point of view, in case of a positive result: the presence and exploitability of a specific weakness, the corrective action will be suggested and probably enforced lately.

Social Engineering
by Falgun Rathod

What if someone ask you for a Password Will you give it? Yes / No You will say Obviously No but this is What I call Social Engineering. According to Wiki “Social Engineering is the act of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information, rather than by breaking in or using technical cracking techniques.”Social Engineering is not a new thing at all it’s the art of lie and to get confidential information to access/Hacked into System.

Benefits of Attribution
by Sayngeun Phouamkha
A good friend by the name of “J” once told me in my very early stages of learning IT Security that, ” The enemy of my enemy is my scapegoat.” Of course knowing nothing of IT Security or the different arenas/specialties of which this field encompasses I had to have him explain in depth and in very non-IT Security terms exactly what that meant and why it was important to know in this line of work.

Attacking POS: history, technique and a look to the future

When we talk about credit and debit card we should remember that this kind of payment was think and launched after the second war from American Express and the card as we know with magstripe was introduced in the market from 1979. Since the beginning of the ’90 years we’ve seen an increase in card fraud, before using the ATM terminals and subsequently affecting the Point of sale terminals (POS). Before talk about fraud we will try to understand how is composed a credit or debit card.

Click Here to Download - https://www.owasp.org/images/7/7b/PENTESTMAG2.pdf

Reverse Engineering Introduction

What is Reverse Engineering?

Have you ever noticed, Nokia or Iphone made an application and after few days you find that on Samsung or any other mobile device. Its nothing that difficult, its called reverse engineering. They decode their programs to get the basic structure of the original program and then following the structure codes their own and sometimes doesn't even happen just make some code changes and uses them.

According to Wikipedia "Reverse engineering is the process of discovering the technological principles of a device, object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation. It often involves taking something (e.g., a mechanical device, electronic component, biological, chemical or organic matter or software program) apart and analyzing its workings in detail to be used in maintenance, or to try to make a new device or program that does the same thing without using or simply duplicating (without understanding) the original".

Ahh.. more technology related. I will explain you in better way. As the name suggest reverse engineer means if have something already made, in computer field say exe installer file. Now what reverse engineering is, decoding the exe in such as fashion that we will get original source code or some what near to it. Consider an example, you have a wall made of bricks, here bricks are base material to build the wall. Now what we want to do is we want to obtain all the bricks from the wall. Similarly we have an executable or dll file and we know programs are made from coding only, so source codes are base material in building executable. So we want to obtain the source code from the executable or some what near to it. As when you break wall also to get the bricks some bricks are also got broken and that's all depend type of material used to fix or mend bricks to make the wall. Similarly the retrieval of source code from executable depends upon how securely software is being packed and type of cryptography or packer is used by its designer.

I hope now you have got what exactly reverse engineering is.

What is the use or benefit of Reverse Engineering?

I can guarantee most of internet users use cracks or keygens or patches. Have you ever tried to understand how they are made. Ahhh... I know you haven't. So let me give you clear information. All the keygens or cracks or patches of software's are made by technique called Reverse Engineering. Oops... I was going to tell the benefits.. what i am telling...negative features... But these are features of reverse engineering my friends and most commonly used by all famous organizations as its a part of their Program promoting methodolgy.

Other Beneficial Uses of Reverse Engineering:

• Product analysis: To examine how a product works
• Removal of copy protection, circumvention of access restrictions.
• Security auditing.
• Extremely useful when you lost documentation.
• Academic/learning purposes.
• Competitive technical intelligence (understand what your competitor is actually doing, versus what they say they are doing).
• Last but not the least..Learning: learn from others' mistakes. Do not make the same mistakes that others have already made and subsequently corrected.

Common Terms Used in Reverse Engineering:

1. Debugger

2. Deassembler

3. Decompiler

4. Packers or Unpackers

5. Program Obfuscation

6. Hex Editing

7. Cryptography

I will explain these terms in detail in my next article. Till then you can explore these topics on internet so that you will have some prior knowledge of Reverse Engineering terms.

Note: Please use this Knowledge for your better understanding of Reverse Engineering and Study not to HARM anyone.

Me on Cover Page of International Security Magazine PenTest based in Europe

Falgun Rathod featured on Cover Page of PenTest Magazine

Social Engineering

What if someone ask you for a Password Will you give it? Yes / No You will say Obviously No but this is What I call Social Engineering. According to Wiki “Social Engineering is the act of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information, rather than by breaking in or using technical cracking techniques.”Social Engineering is not a new thing at all it’s the art of lie and to get confidential information to access/Hacked into System.

by Falgun Rathod

for more - http://pentestmag.com/auditingpentesting-standards-0212/

This is Beginning lots more to come :) ......  

NASA Hacked 13 times last Year

'Unencrypted notebook computers that have been lost or stolen include ones containing codes for controlling the International Space Station as well as sensitive data on NASA's Constellation and Orion programs and Social Security numbers'

NASA said hackers broke into its computer systems 13 times last year, stealing employee credentials and gaining access to mission-critical projects in breaches that could compromise U.S. national security.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration spends only $58 million of its $1.5 billion annual IT budget on cyber security, Paul Martin, the agency's inspector general, told a Congressional panel on NASA security earlier this week.

"Some NASA systems house sensitive information which, if lost or stolen, could result in significant financial loss, adversely affect national security, or significantly impair our nation's competitive technological advantage," Martin said in testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, released on Wednesday. (bit.ly/yQFSB8)

He said the agency discovered in November that hackers working through a Chinese-based IP address broke into the network of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

He said they gained full system access, which allowed them to modify, copy, or delete sensitive files, create user accounts for mission-critical JPL systems and upload hacking tools to steal user credentials and compromise other NASA systems. They were also able to modify system logs to conceal their actions, he said.

"Our review disclosed that the intruders had compromised the accounts of the most privileged JPL users, giving the intruders access to most of JPL's networks," he said.

In another attack last year, intruders stole credentials for accessing NASA systems from more than 150 employees.

Martin said the agency has moved too slowly to encrypt or scramble the data on its laptop computers to protect information from falling into the wrong hands.

Unencrypted notebook computers that have been lost or stolen include ones containing codes for controlling the International Space Station as well as sensitive data on NASA's Constellation and Orion programs and Social Security numbers, Martin said.

Source - Reuters