Let there be the rule of law

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Vijayashankar Na

It is unfortunate that persons like Justice Katju, Digvijay Singh, Jayaprada and others are speaking of some kind of pardon for Mr Sanjay Dutt, who is convicted by the Supreme Court of India to undergo imprisonment for possession of illegal arms.

It is necessary for common citizens of India to raise their voice against this open revolt of some celebrities against the rule of law for the sake of one person who has been convicted under law.

If an exception is made for Mr Sanjay Dutt then there is no meaning for the rule of law in the country.

I urge the Supreme Court to issue contempt of court notice on all the persons who are coming in support of Mr Sanjay Dutt since they are indirectly asking for negation of the Court’s judgment through an illegal extra constitutional process. If this action is not taken then the issue will get policized and corrupt the integrity of our judicial systems.

Additionally it is also necessary to investigate all supporters of Mr Sanjay Dutt if there are any possibilities of involvement in terrorist activities.

Naavi

Posted in Cyber Crime | 1 Comment

Who is causing denial of access?

Posted on March 24, 2013 by Vijayashankar Na

When some spamming is detected by web hosting companies or spam filters, the concerned IP addresses are blocked automatically. At present I have observed that BSNL ip addresses are frequently found in the blocked lists.

When a particular IP address is blocked by a web host, the users of the dynamic IP addresses of the subject ISP experience a “Denial of Service”.

Web server administrators should exercise some due diligence before they block a given IP address since blindly blocking the IP address tantamounts to a “Denial of Access offence” under ITA 2008.

It is possible that some competitors of BSNL in the ISP business may be targetting BSNL by getting the BSNL addresses blocked by undertaking an organized spam attack from BSNL IP addresses.

BSNL should do a study of how many of their IP addreses are now in the blocked list of major spam filters.

I have been experiencing such blocking of addresses in the range 117.192.128.0/20 during my site maintenance activities. In such cases I need to use an alternate ISP to log in and request the web host manager to unblock my IP address.

Though on my specific request my web host manager removes it from the IP block list since I am maintaining my site with them, the visitors have no such choice to get their IP addresses unblocked and the site therefore remains blocked for them.

A solution needs to be found to this problem. Comments are welcome.

Naavi

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Botnet steals US$6 million from advertisers

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Vijayashankar Na

Simulating visitors to a website who click on advertisements, a botnet named “Chameleon” is reported to have stolen around US$ 6 million in the form of false clicks on advertisements. The botnet used about 120000 hosts simulating the ad-clicking.

Report: 

About 5000 IP addresses participating in the botnet have now been disabled.

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Cyber attack on South Korea

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Vijayashankar Na

South Korean networks were down in what is believed to be a Cyber Attack from North Korea.

The attack has crippled Bank transactions including the ATM networks.

Report here:

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MD5 to SHA256..but password cracking becomes easier

Posted on March 22, 2013 by Vijayashankar Na

In an interesting evelations, it is stated that CISCO has recently started using a different method for storing user’s passwords which involves shifting from MD5 to SHA 256 which makes passwords more vulnerable to cracking.

We are aware that MD5 is reportedly compromised and in fact Indian CCA has dis-accredited MD5 algorithm for DigitalSignature purpose and shifted to SHA256/512.

According to security experts the new password storing system converts passwords into SHA256 hash code using a single iteration and without any cryptographic salt(Randaom data input).

The earlier methodis reported to have used 1000 iterations of MD5 hash with a cryptographic salt to each password. This is said to make cracking slower and requiring more tries.

Security specialists have also pointed out that at present relatively inexpensive systems outfitted with 2 AMD Radeop 6990 graphic cards and working with “Hashcat password cracking program can make 2.8 billion cracking tries per second.

CISCO is reported to have acknowledged the issue and stated that adoption of the low security method was forced by certain implementation problems.

Hopefully CISCO is working on setting right the weakness.

Refer details here:

Posted in Cyber Crime, ITA 2008 | Leave a comment

Delhi High Court Decision hurts Digital Media

Posted on March 16, 2013 by Vijayashankar Na

Delhi High Court has recently held that “Dissemination of ball by ball information of a cricket match” is not included in “Press Freedom”. In a strange decision the Court has held that Press should confine its activities to report only after 15 minutes.

Report

The order grants “A limited interim injunction restraining the defendants from disseminating contemporaneous match information in the form of ball-by-ball or minute-by-minute score updates/match alerts for a premium, without obtaining a license from the plaintiff”

However “There shall be no restriction upon the defendants to report noteworthy information or news from cricket matches as and when they arise, because stale news is no news.”

also, “There shall be no requirement for the license if the defendants do it gratuitously or after a time lag of 15 minutes”

The judgement also has many other debatable decisions such as distinguishing the rights of the “Free” vs “Premium” recipients of information.

According to observers, STAR has already issued notices to service providers as if they have “Absolute Rights” instead of the 15 minutes rights.

The decision is a set back for “Press Freedom” and in particular for digital media including SMS, Blogging etc and needs a serious review.

Copy of Judgement

Naavi

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