44 deemed universities derecognized by GOVT

New Delhi, Jan 19: The center on Monday, Jan 18, informed the Supreme Court of its decision to derecognise 44 deemed university across the country.

In the affidavit filed in the Supreme Court, the Human Resource Development

ministry cited irregualties in giving the 'deemed' tags to these institutions during the time of HRD minister Arjun Singh under the first UPA government.

Human Resource and Development ministry added that the government has approved the recommendations made by the high-powered P N Tandon committee and the Special Task Force, which set up to suggest measures to tackle the problem.

"The Review Committee came across several aberrations in the functioning of some of the institutions deemed to be universities. It found undesirable management architecture where families rather than professional academics controlled the functioning of institutions," the affidavit said.

The Center's study which includes 126 deemed universities across the country found 44 universities completely unfit to be conferred with the deemed tag.

44 other universities will given time to improve themesleves, while the remaining 38 was found to be doing well.

6 universities in Karnataka is on the unfit list. Tamil Nadu has 16 universities out of the 44 derecognize list. Uttar Pradesh has four, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan and Maharashtra has three each and one each in Gujarat, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Bihar.

In a recent statement, HRD minister Kapil Sibal, questioned the functioning of these universities.

Sibal said that some of these universities do not fulfill the eligibility criteria and were found to be lacking in basic infrastructure like university campus and teaching staff.

The affidavit by the center,  came after the Supreme Court's directives to act on a PIL, seeking action against deemed universities which flout academic standards and norms and function solely on commercial purpose.

The list of universities which will be derecognized are as follows:

1. Christ College, Bangalore

2. Vignan's Foundation for Science, Technology and Research, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh

3. Lingaya's University, Faridabad

4. St Peter's Institute of Higher Education and Research, Chennai

5. Noorul Islam Centre for Higher Education, Kanyakumari

6. Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida

7.Shobhit Institute of Engineering and Technology, Meerut

8. Sumandeep Vidyapeet, Vadodara, Gujarat

9. Sri Devraj Urs Academy of Higher Education and Reserch, Kolar, Karnataka

10. Yenepoya University, Mangalore

11. BLDE University, Bijapur, Karnataka

12.Krishna Institute of Medical Sciences, Satara, Maharashtra

13.D Y Patil Medical College, Kolhapur, Maharashtra

14. Meenakshi Academy of Higher Education and Research, Chennai

15. Chettinad Academy of Research and Education, Kanchipuram

16. HIHT University, Dehradun

17. Santosh University, Ghaziabad

18. Maharshi Markandeshwar University, Ambala, Haryana

19. Manav Rachna International University, Faridabad

20. Sri Siddhartha Academy of Higher Education, Tumkur, Karnataka

21. Jain University, Bangalore

22. Tilak Maharashtra Vidyapeeth, Pune

23. Siksha "O" Anusandha, Bhubaneswar

24. Janardan Rai Nagar, Udaipur, Rajasthan

25. Institute of Advanced Studies in Education of Gandhi Vidya Mandir, Sardarshahr, Rajasthan

26. Mody Institute of Technology, Sikar, Rajasthan

27. Dr MGR Educational and Research Institute, Chennai

28. Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences, Chennai

29. Kalasalingam Academy of Research and Education, Virdhunagar, Tamil Nadu

30. Periryar Maniammai Institute of Science and Technology, Thanjavur

31. Academy of Maritime Education and Training, Chennai

32. Vel's Institute of Science, Technology and Advanced Studies, Chennai

33. Karpagam Academy of Higher Education, Coimbatore

34. Vel Tech Rangaraja Dr Sagunthal R&D Institute of Science, Chennai

35. Gurukul Kangri, Haridwar

36. Grapich Era University, Dehradun

37. Nehru Gram Bharati Vishwavidyalaya, Allahabad

38. Sri Balaji Vidyapeeth, Puducherry

39. Vinayaka Mission's Research Foundation, Salem, Tamil Nadu

40.Bharath Institute of Higher Education And Research, Chennai

41. Ponnaiya Ramajayam Institute of Science and Technology, Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu

42. Nava Nalanda Mahavira, Nalanda, Bihar

43. Rajiv Gandhi National Institute of Youth Development, Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu

44. National Museum, Institute of the History of Art Conservation and Musicology, Janpath, New     Delhi.

Some highlights of the Cyber Criminal's 2009

Cyber criminals too can hold you to ransom, by encrypting important files or locking you out of your own computer

BANGALORE, INDIA: The past few months have witnessed wave after wave of online pandemics. Never-seen-before strains of existing malicious codes and completely new Trojans spread across millions of computers worldwide. Your computer, your identity, your money… nothing was spared in the cyber mafia's attempt to take over the internet.
Among the millions of attacks that Symantec has observed, a few stood out – in terms of reach, damage and sheer ingenuity. Read on for a lowdown on 5 highlights of the cyber criminal's 2009.
 
Locking you out of your own homepage
RANSOMWARE: Like in the physical world, cyber criminals too can hold you to ransom, by encrypting important files or locking you out of your own computer.
This threat uses scare or nuisance tactics—similar to rogue antivirus programs—in an attempt to demand ransom from its victims. Once infected with Trojan.Ransompage, an example of a Trojan that achieves this, your browser will display a persistent inline ad on every page you visits. The ad will cover part of the original Web page, as shown below. The ad will stay on the screen even if the page is scrolled. This ad is written in Russian and states that in order to remove the ad (and to gain access a porn site) the victim must send a premium rate text message to the number provided, and the user will receive a code to remove the ad.
You may think you can avoid this by simply switching browsers. However, the malware author is a step ahead and targeted three very popular browser with this piece of malware.
The other face of social networking
KOOBFACE: The Koobface worm infects users by using social engineering attacks. It spreads by abusing social networking websites or by employing search engine optimization techniques to lure potential victims to malicious sites.

MODE OF TRANSMISSION: The infrastructure used by the Koobface gang is relatively simple: a central server redirects victims to one of the infected bots where the social engineering attack takes place. While the central redirection point has been actively targeted by take-down requests, the Koobface gang has so far been quick to replace suspended domain names and blacklisted IPs with new ones.

A year has passed since Koobface was first detected; yet, this worm and the people behind it are still very active in keeping their infrastructure up to date, finding new means of propagating the infection, and taking advantage of their victims.
In just three weeks, Symantec observed 17,170 distinct infected IP addresses. This gave us a basis to gauge the extent of the infection. The figure below shows the geographic location of these Koobface bots. As indicated, several Indian cities are home to Koobface bots.
Flying into the cyber mafia's trap
AIRLINE TICKET SPAM: All of us want to travel the world, if only we could afford the astronomical airfares! Cyber criminals know that, which is why they've made it easy to grab cheap – or free – airline tickets to popular destinations. You don't even have to look for it online, because these offers land straight in your mailbox!
Symantec researchers are observing an increase in spam that is offering cheap airline tickets or gift vouchers to use towards a purchase of airline tickets. Spam messages are originating with email addresses, such as "AirlineTickets@spam-domain" and "Free.Airline.Tickets@spam-domain." A link redirects the user to an online form where the user's personal information and credit card details are requested. In many cases, it's the victim's money that will travel the world, and not the victim himself.
The top 10 headlines used in airline ticket spam are as follows:
Subject: RE: 2 [airline name removed] Airline Tickets
Subject: Fly the skies with cheap airfares.
Subject: Fly Anywhere in the U.S.
Subject: 2 Round Trip Airline tickets. Fly anywhere in the US
Subject: Airfare on us - with this [airline name removed] Airlines Reward Card
Subject: Airline ticket bookings made easier.
Subject: Airline tickets. The quickest way to anywhere.
Subject: Airline tickets to any place in the world.
Subject: Amazing deals across all airlines.
Subject: Book cheap airline tickets now!
Even death can't stop them
TRAGEDY SPAM: Three global celebrities passed away last year, and while the world mourned, cyber criminals got busy. The deaths of Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson were prime targets for spammers and malicious code authors alike.
Internet users saw a flurry of threats seeking to play upon the emotions and curiosity of the public around these events. If you looked for news, videos, pictures, or any information regarding these individuals and their lives, you're likely to have had a close encounter with the cyber mafia.

In just one of several examples, Symantec observed spam that appears to be a spoof on CNN but actually contains a link to a malicious Web page. Users who clicked on the link were redirected to a page that prompted them to download and run a file on a fake Flash Player, which actually installed malicious code.
Here are some of the additional spam and online tactics Symantec saw:
Spam with subject lines related to these deaths with malware attached Search engine poisoning campaigns injecting malicious sites into the top search engine results related to any of these deaths Sites and links claiming to host videos of the last moments of these individuals lives, but actually peddling fake goods or malware Social networking messages on these deaths that linked to malware Dial T for trouble The increasing use of smartphones has given cyber criminals a vast, lucrative new avenue to create trouble. Recently, we've seen a series of threats that target mobile phones. With India's mobile additions exceeding 12 million every month, the payoff for the online mafia is quite obvious. Described below two unique attacks.
PHONESNOOP: A Blackberry application called PhoneSnoop was released recently, which allowed remote users to listen in on a Blackberry user's surroundings.
 
The application is actually quite straightforward and uses standard Blackberry APIs that allow the interception of incoming phone calls. When a call is received from a preconfigured phone number, the call is automatically answered and the speakerphone is engaged. Someone who has had this application installed may not notice the incoming phone call and not realize someone can now listen in on the immediate surroundings.
THE IPHONE WORM: The number of attacks designed to exploit a certain operating system or platform is directly related to that platform's market share, as malware authors want the biggest bang for their buck. In 2009, we saw Macs and smartphones targeted more by malware authors, for example the Sexy Space botnet aimed at the Symbian mobile device operating system and the OSX.Iservice Trojan targeting Mac users.
An Australian hacker wrote the first worm for jailbroken iPhones. The worm has been dubbed "Ikee" and uses the default SSH password of jailbroken iPhones to log in and spread.

Many users who have jailbroken their iPhones in order to customize them have not changed their SSH password, allowing others to log in to their phone. Once a vulnerable iPhone is found, the worm changes the wallpaper to a picture of Rick Astley (a prank known as Rickrolling), deletes the SSH daemon, and begins scanning the network for other vulnerable phones.

Bharti to roll-out WiFi hotspots in India

Airtel plans to launch more than 1000 hotspots across the nation by end of 2010

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Toeing the lines of Tata Communications and state-owned telecom operator BSNL, Bharti Airtel is all set get into the WiFi market by launching hotspots across the nation.  Google Yahoo Microsoft: The WiFI war is on In a report in The Economic Times, Vikas Singh, CMO for Telemedia Services at Bharti Airtel had been quoted as saying, "Airtel WiFi hotspots will be strategically located at leading premium hotels, hospitals, chains of restaurants, coffee shops and corporate buildings that are the hub of corporate, community and social activities. For us, this is an initiative to increase customer stickiness and enhance average revenue per user (ARPU) of our broadband customer base." Airtel plans to launch more than 1000 hotspots across the nation by end of 2010, however, the service will only be accessible by current Airtel Broadband subscribers initially. Currently, Tata Communications are the market leaders in this segment with over 500 hotspots and BSNL is also in the process of setting up WiFi hotspots across the country.

How to secure network from hackers?

Every four minutes a network is hacked costing organizations millions of dollars. Using penetration testing tools, ethical hackers can save them from this pain




BANGALORE, INDIA: The history of crime prevention is similar to the history of warfare. First an offense takes place and to counter it a defense is developed. Modern age bandits are malicious hackers who strategically infringe into a network and get away with sensitive data. The worst that they can do with your data is, selling the data to competitors or can even blackmail you over your personal stuff.

The hacking business has surpassed illegal drug trafficking as a criminal money maker. Every 4 minutes a network is hacked and this costs the organization millions to cover for the losses. So instead of spending millions on covering losses the organizations prefer to protect their network by hiring people who penetrate the company network under a signed contract. These people are called ethical hackers or pen-testers who try to gain access into the network without knowing usernames and passwords. These people run various rigorous tests on the network and test its security infrastructure.

The techniques and software used to carry out pen-tests are called pen-tools or penetration tools. These tools are also used by hackers to hack into the systems and networks, so the basic difference between a pen-tester and hacker is permission. The pen-tester is permitted to actually hack into the network (up to a certain extent only), while the hacker hacks the network without permission and steals information. Pen-testing is a precautionary exercise that lets the organization know if there is any vulnerability in its security infrastructure so that they can correct them as instructed by the pen-tester.

Pen-testing can be categorized as Black Box testing; where the pen-tester has no knowledge of the system he will penetrate (simulation of the real time situation where the hacker works on an alien system), another type is White Box penetration testing, where a pen-tester is provided significant knowledge about the network and in many cases these tests are done in conjunction with the IT team of the company. After the tests are conducted a well documented report is written and presented.

Benefits of pen-testing
What is the need for us to pen test our network? Who will hack our network and what would he get in return? These obvious questions pop up in the mind of many business owners when probed  about security. Small enterprises lack a dedicated force for security of their information and if it exists it is more or less business driven, experts if any are not well experienced. The goal of the organization is liquidity and security is not given much concern.

Some businesses just get fine with automatic software updates, strong passwords, and a firewall, whereas others need some more control. For intruders it's about getting access to resources the easiest way possible and if we go by records there has been a sharp increase in security breaches within small enterprises. The big money is now in stealing personal identification number (PIN) information together with associated credit and debit accounts. PIN based frauds are directly related to withdrawing cash from a person's account. Small enterprises may be attacked as an opportunity or they may be randomly selected from large population of vulnerable organizations.

Unlike small and medium enterprises which are quite ignorant about their security, large enterprises spend significant amounts of capital on their security and privacy. Since the security of the large enterprises is directly related to their reputation, they take a lot of pain in ensuring that their networks are safe and secure. Another reason for large enterprises to protect their network is growing competition, as recently we have seen a lot of large emerging companies that are ready to meet any end to capture the market.

As organizations become more and more aware they have started budgeting over IT security practices and lot of small and medium business are also becoming savvier in making decisions over IT security concerns. The organizations are constantly thriving to gain the customer confidence, and so are spending huge amounts on their security practices and this is where penetration testing comes into picture.

We launched a Brute Force attack using a tool called Cain & Abel to decrypt the encrypted passwords added to the network.

Cain & Abel was used to launch an ARP Poisoning and Sniffing attack on the target network to fetch passwords.

Cain & Abel used for retrieving passwords of duped users on the network. You can see all the passwords and names of users who were duped on the network. Pen-test vs vulnerability assessment The vulnerability test gets into system till it isn't compromised while the penetration tests can compromise a system as per the contract with the company. Most organizations carry out vulnerability tests instead of penetration tests. Vulnerability test is only about identifying and quantifying the security flaws, while penetration testing is active analysis of the system for any weaknesses or flaws and can involve active exploitation of security vulnerabilities. Security issues are reported to the owner and often a technical solution is suggested. Penetration tools Many penetration tools are existent today and most are freeware, however our focus is on two important tools, VoIP and firewall testing tools. To test VoIP we selected Cain & Abel since this tool is developed for Microsoft operating systems. It is basically a password recovery tool with many useful utilities like dictionary attack, cryptanalysis, brute forcing attack, and ARP poisoning, recovering local security asserts secrets. An important feature of Cain and Abel is that it works within in an established LAN as soon as we move out from LAN this test is of little use. We performed some interesting tests with this tool, namely brute forcing attack, ARP poisioning and recovered LSA secrets for a local machine. Some useful and tested features of this test are: Protected password recovery:  Reveals locally stored passwords of Outlook, Outlook Express, Outlook Express Identities, Outlook 2002, Internet Explorer and MSN Explorer. Brute force attack: The most effective technique to generate password based on various combinations. It is applied to hash files generated through PwDump  utility. LSA Secrets Dumper: Dumps the contents of the Local Security Authority Secrets. Sniffer: Captures passwords, hashes and authentication information while they are transmitted on the network. Includes several filters for application specific authentications and routing protocols. The VoIP filter enables the capture of voice conversations transmitted with the SIP/RTP protocol saved later as WAV files. ARP Poisoning Attack: This attack is based on poisoning of the ARP cache of the switch, as it is known that all the traffic in a LAN is passed through a switch which maintains ARP (Address Resolution protocol) cache. The attack basically poisons the ARP cache of the switch so that all traffic will move through the attacker's machine without the knowledge of the user. Cain and Abel is user friendly and its results are 99% accurate. The newest version, v49.35, has added support for Windows 2008 Server in APR-RDP sniffing filter. For more references you can log on to www.oxid.it. A limitation with Cain and Abel is that you have to get into the network to use it. Another limitation is that since it is free and created for use in educational and security purposes, it can also be used by hackers to hack into your network. There are many network tools which are used for mapping networks, however the most popular of them is Firewalk which is used to gather information about the remote network. The principle of firewalk is based on traceroute. However, the limitation of traceroute is that with this we can only trace the response of the gateways but the knowledge about its internal network is not known. If we want to trace the network behind the firewall, we have to run a slightly different kind of probe. This probe lets us know the kind of traffic a firewall can pass through. To extract information with the traceroute probe it is necessary that we know the IP address of the gateway. Once we get the gateway IP we can now run a scan which will let us know the kind of protocol packets that are accepted by the firewall. This is simple. Run a scan and if you don't get a response then the protocol used by you is blocked by the firewall. Try sending packets for different protocols and monitor the response. By sending packets to every host behind the firewall an accurate map about network topology can be generated. Firewalk It is one of the popular reconnaissance and an open source tool used for determining what four layers will a given IP forwarding device will pass. The working includes sending TCP/UDP packets with TTL (Time to Live) one greater than the targeted gateway. The gateway will forward the packets to the next hop where they will expire and an error message stating ICMP_TIME_ EXCEEDED is displayed, however if the gateway blocks the packet it will give no response. To get the correct IP TTL that will expire one hop beyond the gateway, we need to ramp up hop counts. After ramping we can start scanning the network. Firewalk can be used as an hacking tool by hackers and can also be used by pen-testers to examine that ACLs (Access control lists are used on  routers to limit the protocols allowed to pass through the host system behind the router) are doing what they are intended to do. When we opened two ports SMTP (25) and HTTP (80) by port forwarding in the firewall and tried to scan them using NETCAT, these results were obtained. We tried a similar test to determine the network behind the firewall by creating a dummy network and running test over it. The network included a firewall (Endian), a mail server and a client computer. The three interfaces of firewall ? WAN , internal and DMZ were connected as a network. The WAN interface was connected to the Internet terminal while an internal network behind the firewall was made to which a mail pop3 server was connected and this was connected to the DMZ interface. A test machine running backtrack was used as an Attacking machine. A firewall probe was then run on the machine and results were recorded. As the setup was very simple and didn't have any misconfiguration in our case, Firewalk was not able to detect any configuration error in the setup. NETCAT NETCAT is a  computer networking service  for reading and writing network  connections using TCP and UDP  protocols. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and investigation tool, since it can produce almost any kind of correlation you would need. It is basically a UNIX based utility but its Windows compatible versions are also available. NETCAT can also be used as a port scanner which detects the open ports on the target machine. We used NETCAT for scanning the open ports on the target machine and to get the information of the network behind the firewall. One may think, it is even possible to connect to an arbitarary ports using even a simple tool like Telnet so what is the USP of this tool. The explanation lies in the fact that Telnet has standard input EOF problem so one must introduce calculated delays in driving scripts to allow network output to finish. Telnet also will not transfer arbitrary binary data, because certain characters are interpreted as Telnet options and are thus removed from the data stream.