60 seconds only ? The time limit seems very short in real life, but not when it is accounted for all the techie operations that are being done ONLINE in each passing moment. You take 20 deep breaths and tonnes of things are being uploaded, downloaded, shared, converted, encrypted, decrypted, written and read in increasingly virtually & socially dependent World Online.

It would be interesting for most of you to know that following are the things that are being done in 60 secondsas of year 2011.

• 690,000+ Google Searches
• 170+ Million emails being sent out.
• 60+ New Blogs being setup
• 2000+ Blog posts being posted each minute
• 700,000+ Million Facebook Status updates…
• 80,000+ Wall Posts
• 500,000+ Facebook comments…
• 50+ WordPress Downloads
• 7,000+ Flickr image uploads…
• 100,000+ Tweets
• 400,000+ minutes of Skype calls in 60 seconds
• 600+ Hours of Youtube videos being uploaded in each minute / 25 Hours playtime videos being uploaded in 60 seconds.
• 20,000+ Applications being downloaded from iOS App Store.
• 100+ new LinkedIN accounts

Plus numerous other things being done which could take hours writing here… In short, the life in digital world is moving pretty fast, atleast 1000 times faster than one’s own Offline Life. The trend has just started, and will keep growing with at least 10-15% boost each year on year.

Users of facebook are again in trouble due to the new scam called “Yeahh!! It happens on Live Television!”. This is spreading rapidly among the users. In this a semi nude pic is shown to attract the users and force them to click on the video link. The lady shown in the video post is Marika Fruscio an Italian Model, She had Wardrobe malfunction on a live TV show. Once a user clicks on the video link, it asks for age verification which is actually a hidden link. On click this executes the javascript code which posts the same link with yout contacts. And it aks for a survey to see the video. Thus scammer makes money each time a user go for the survey.

how to protect from these scams:

The only thing you need to do to protect yourself is self control. Do not try to open this type of strange videos. These can be identified by the messages posted with videos. You should also report these as spam to help facebook to control these scams.

Few days back Anonymous had announced to attack on Sony again to their support SOPA. They said in a statment,“Your support of the act is a signed death warrant to Sony Company and Associates. Therefore, yet again, we have decided to destroy your network. We will dismantle your phantom from the internet. Prepare to be extinguished. Justice will be swift, and it will be for the people, whether some like it or not.”

The hackers said they obtained access to their entire database, the first video, which has been quickly removed, displayed a picture of a Sony Pictures Mobile dashboard.

Last year, Anonymous has hacked Sony manytimes and forced sony to shutdown the gaming network for several weeks.

Stage 1 (WORKSHOP ROUND to be held at Zonal Centers):

• An ethical hacking/cyber security workshop will be held at different Zonal centers –all over India. The details of the zonal centers and workshop contents are available on our website.
• All the participants who want to participate in Hack-Trick-2012 are required to attend the workshops at any zonal center.
• The workshop fee is included in the Registration Charges.
• During the workshop “Hacking Tool Kit” will be provided by sponsors of this event.
• The duration of the workshop will be of 2 Days.
• The workshop will be delivered by iSecLABz.

Stage 2 (ZONAL ROUND to be held at zonal center):

• Just after the workshop a Mega Competition Zonal final of Hack-Trick-2012 will be held.
• Winners will be awarded certificate of merit and will be offered free internship in iSecLABz.

Stage 3 (FINAL ROUND to be held at IIT-Kharagpur):

• All the zonal winners will be called to participate in the final round.
• Top 3 teams will be awarded as winners of the championship & will also be awarded the respective prizes.

Source :  http://tieit.trubainstitute.ac.in/index.php/events/hacks-tricks-2012.html

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,100 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 13 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 37 posts. There were 5 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 575kb.

The busiest day of the year was February 4th with 27 views. The most popular post that day was Mobile Number portability : A synonym for telecom revolution.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were google.co.in, counter.bestproceed.com, statistics.bestproceed.com, mambang-x.com, and bigextracash.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for famous hackers in india, fooling rapidshare, windows 7, jobs for hackers in india, and how hackers work.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Mobile Number portability : A synonym for telecom revolution October 2009
35 comments

BSNL DataCard, EVDO and ICC(BSNL-NIC) Modem Tariff Rate Plans October 2009
12 comments

How Hackers Work? February 2010
29 comments

Windows 7 OEM-SLP Product Key crack Might Get Blocked and Blacklisted by Microsoft October 2009
3 comments

What’s next after Windows 7 release, Windows 8…9? October 2009
2 comments

Google engineers have tested a “self-driving” car on the streets of California and covered 140,000 miles on the road, BBC reported.

The cars use video cameras mounted on the roof, radar sensors and a laser range finder to look out for traffic, software engineer Sebastian Thrun said.

There is, however, a trained driver in stand-by mode, ready to take control.

Thrun, a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University, said safety was the “first priority” in the project.

Routes are pre-planned, mapped first by real drivers, and local police are briefed in advance, he said.

He pointed to figures from the World Health Organisation that over 1.2 million people were killed each year on the roads, and said that number could be reduced.

“We believe our technology has the potential to cut that number, perhaps by as much as half.”

“It (the project) provides a glimpse of what transportation might look like in the future thanks to advanced computer science. And that future is very exciting,” he said.

The wi-fi hacking means criminals can spy on the activities of families, perhaps stealing their identity and banking details to raid their accounts, says a new study.

The hackers could also use the wi-fi access to tap into illegal pornography or upload and download stolen music and movies without being traced.

An ‘ethical hacking’ experiment in six cities, using freely available software, found almost 40,000 home wi-fi networks at high risk, reports the Daily Mail.

Separately, there are concerns about the security of those who use free wi-fi networks offered by coffee shops and other businesses.

The study, commissioned by card protection and insurance firm CPP, highlights a cavalier attitude to keeping data safe.

According to the findings, nearly a quarter of private wireless networks have no password attached, making them accessible to criminals.

CPP fraud expert Michael Lynch said: ‘We urge all wi-fi users to remember that any information they volunteer through public networks can easily be visible to hackers.”

“An electronic war has been launched against Iran,” Mahmoud Liaii, a top official in Tehran, was quoted as saying in September, after the country confirmed the worm infected its systems.

By the time he reacted, a technology firm in Bulgaria had already exposed the existence of what became known as the Stuxnet virus and Siemens, the German company which made the targeted systems, was working on a fix.

Experts believe the virus was likely around since 2009, sliding under firewalls undetected.

Stuxnet alerted the world yet again to a recurring problem which was brought to the international forefront in 2000, when a virus with the enticing message, “I love you”, caused billions of dollars in damage around the world.

Two Philippine students, using equipment worth less than $1,000, were behind that attack and were later set free after authorities realised they had violated no law.

Since then, viruses have become subtler, faster, more aggressive and harder to trace, while the nascent rulebook is still weak.

“We are not looking at threats in a traditional sense. It is not business as usual,” said Alex Ntoko, who heads up the International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) Corporate Strategy Division. “Any individual who can write code is a potential superpower.”

Consultants suggest that even the technological heavyweights have been lax in the cyber world.

Israel only recently began to limit its soldiers’ access to the web when they were on military computers – years after the first top-secret documents accidentally entered public online domain.

Earlier this year, Noah Shachtman, writing for the Progressive Policy Institute, noted that the Pentagon was looking to ban access from its computers to social media sites, seeing no other way to ensure confidentiality, even as it kept secret data flowing through unencrypted networks.

The US and Israel are the prime suspects in the Stuxnet virus. But they are not the only countries believed to be engaging in dirty programming wars.

China ran afoul of the US and its private sector behemoths, including Google, on various occasions in the last eight years, accused of numerous hacks. North Korea has been charged with trying to overload or disrupt Western networks.

And the Georgian parliament’s website was embarrassingly hacked in 2008, during the country’s brief and disastrous war with Russia.

“In Georgia, we saw a case that might have been an example of cyber war, but only because it occurred at time of declared war. But Georgia never followed it up as such,” said Eneken Tikk, the legal adviser to the CCD COE, a cyber research unit accredited to NATO.

For now, though, cyber war and its legalities remain theoretical.

In 1863, modern warfare established its first rules. Over the years, new technologies were used on the battlefields and the agreements morphed into the generally accepted laws of war laid out in the Geneva Convention.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) believes the rules were created by open-minded people.

“International humanitarian law applies to any new technology. It doesn’t matter that the technology was not dreamed of by the founders,” says Robin Geiss with the ICRC’s legal team.

Geiss recently attended the Bruges Colloquium in Belgium, where military specialists, lawyers and tech gurus gathered to discuss legislation on cyber-warfare, the military use of outer space, drones and automated weapons systems.

“We traditionally dealt with kinetic violence, meaning that we saw the damage right away. With cyber, it is more clandestine and may not be immediately visible,” he explained.

But the rules of attack still apply. Which means the launcher of a virus must differentiate between civilian and military targets. Failure to do so could be tantamount to a war crime.

A cyber attack “is not just about inflicting harm on a computer but harm on critical infrastructure”, said Ntoko at the ITU. Power grids, water networks, railway tracks are all online in some form.

Last month, in the first ever public appearance by a head of the British secret services, Sir John Sawyer laid out his outlook.

“It’s more than obvious that the dangers of terrorism, nuclear proliferation and cyber attack are not much impressed by international borders,” Sawyer said.

Ntoko believes this borderless threat requires a UN brokered treaty to regulate the networks.

However, extreme differences still remain between major powers.

For example, officials in Washington have seen Moscow’s proposals for an international treaty as efforts to ensure control rests in the hands of governments, placing restraints on the internet.

“The discipline is too immature to push for international consensus,” said Tikki, the lawyer.

In the meantime, rights groups in the West are worried about privacy. US officials have admitted that the top-secret National Security Agency was “over-collecting” information on citizens.

The balance for security, liberty and humanitarian checkpoints in the cyber world is not easily reached, experts warn.

The people at the Red Cross hope at least safeguards can be put in place before hostilities rage, to ensure protection for the weakest: civilians who suffer first and harshest in any war.

Eventually, it will be able to tell who the user is, where they are looking and even how they are feeling.

Face verification is already used in laptops, webcams and the Xbox 360 Kinect but this is the first time the technology is being used with such sophistication in mobile devices such as smartphones.

“Existing mobile face trackers give only an approximate position and scale of the face,” said Phil Tresadern from the University of Manchester, Britain, who led the project, the Daily Mail reported.

“Our model runs in real time and accurately tracks a number of landmarks on and around the face such as the eyes, nose, mouth and jaw line,” he said.

“A mobile phone with a camera on the front captures a video of your face and tracks 22 facial features.”

This can make face recognition more accurate, and has great potential for novel ways of interacting with a mobile phone, Tresadern said.

“At this stage, we’re particularly interested in demonstrating uses for the face-tracking part of the technology,” he said. “It is very fast and I can’t find anything that can rival it on a mobile phone.”

The new software, built on 20 years of research at the university, has been demonstrated on a Nokia N900 for the EU-funded “Mobile Biometrics” (MoBio) project.

The sensors could create new ultra high bandwidth mobile internet infrastructures and reduce the density of mobile phone base stations.

Engineers from Queen’s Institute of Electronics, Communications and Information Technology are working on a new project based on the rapidly developing science of body-centric communications.

Social benefits could include vast improvements in mobile gaming and remote healthcare, along with new precision monitoring of athletes and real-time tactical training in team sports, an institute release said.

The researchers are investigating how small sensors carried by members of the public, in items such as next generation smartphones, could communicate with each other to create potentially vast body-to-body networks.

The new sensors would interact to transmit data, providing ‘anytime, anywhere’ mobile network connectivity.

Simon Cotton from the institute’s wireless communications research group said: “In the past few years, a significant amount of research has been undertaken into antennae and systems designed to share information across the surface of the human body.”

“Until now, however, little work has been done to address the next major challenge which is one of the last frontiers in wireless communication – how that information can be transferred efficiently to an off-body location,” he added.

“The availability of body-to-body networks could bring great social benefits, including significant healthcare improvements through the use of body-worn sensors for the widespread, routine monitoring and treatment of illness away from medical centres,” Cotton said.

If the idea takes off, body-to-body networks could also lead to a reduction in the number of base stations needed to service mobile phone users, particularly in areas of high population density, he added.