President Obama & Congress Will Issue Long Awaited Executive Cyber Security Order

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 2/12/2013 07:05:00 pm

President Obama & Congress Will Issue Long Awaited Executive Cyber Security Order 

Last week we reported that Pentagon has declared that they are moving toward a major expansion of its cyber security force to counter increasing attacks on the nation’s computer networks, as well as to expand offensive computer operations on foreign adversaries. Just one week after this declaration another crucial movement came from the U.S. government.  A secret legal review on the use of America’s growing arsenal of cyber weapons has concluded that President Obama has the broad power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad. According to sources President Barack Obama will issue a long-awaited cyber security executive order this week. Two former White House officials told the publication that the order is expected to be released after Tuesday night's State of the Union address. 
Given his status as commander-in-chief, Obama seems to be the clear choice, but since cyber warfare is such a new and unknown thing, the government hasn't actually figured out the rules of engagement yet. In the past couple of decades, the power to use America's cyber weapons has been shared between the Pentagon and the various intelligence agencies. With the exception of a series of strikes on the computer systems that run Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities an attack that Obama ordered himself the U.S. hasn't launched any major cyber attacks in recent memory, however. This probably won't be the case in the future. So the government is working on new rules of engagement, as it realizes that the capabilities of cyber weapons are evolving at a startling rate. The rules will be not unlike the set that governs how drone attacks are ordered and who orders them. Cyber warfare certainly stands to affect the average American more, though.  On Capitol Hill this week, Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) and Rep. Mike Rodgers (R-Mich.) are set to reintroduce the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
According to an exclusive report the bill would allow the government to share classified cyber threats with the private sector so that those companies can then protect their systems from cyber attacks. The bill was killed last year due to privacy concerns. Civil-liberty groups argued that the bill allows companies to exchange too much personal information back and forth without regulation. 







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HostGator India Hacked & Defaced By Indian Hacker Group Named "Cyber Rog"

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 2/09/2013 01:46:00 pm

HostGator India Hacked & Defaced By Indian Hacker Group Named "Cyber Rog"

In the cyber space no one is secured, whether its a defense organization, govt sector, federal authorities, giant IT company or even a hosting provider. The famous line "Security is an Illusion" is quite true, and it happens to one of the giant of web hosting provider "HostGator." It was the Indian domain of HostGator which have fallen victim in front of hackers. Few Indian hackers calling them selves "Cyber Rog" breached the tight security system of HostGator, not only that, but also the hackers uploaded his deface page in order to give some message to this giant hosting provider. "Let look at your face, you get pawned man" -said  those hackers from Cyber Rog. They also vows to hit back while saying "Secure your website, next time we will be back." At the end the hacker group made a satire while camouflaging them selves while saying "We are Anonymous" followed by a funny symbol. Immediately after this massacre get spotted the HostGator team restored the site and deleted the hackers page as shown in the picture below.

But you can still view the deface page from a mirror site called "Legend-H" Such matter is deferentially shameful for company like HostGator  who had passed the 200,000 mark in registered domains in 2008 and now that number has touched 80,00,000. 




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Pentagon Assigning More Experts to Boost Cyber Security & Protect U.S. Computer Networks

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 2/06/2013 07:12:00 pm

Pentagon Assigning More Experts to Boost Cyber Security & Protect U.S. Computer Networks

Cyber security has become one of the most sophisticated area of National security and defense, and in order to implement that Pentagon has increased their estimated expense on cyber security. And this deceleration has been made while publishing the budget late in last year. Now that implementation is getting executed as the Pentagon is moving toward a major expansion of its cyber security force to counter increasing attacks on the nation’s computer networks, as well as to expand offensive computer operations on foreign adversaries. This confirmation has came from defense officials. The expansion would increase the Defense Department’s Cyber Command by more than 4,000 people, up from the current 900, an American official said. Defense officials acknowledged that a formidable challenge in the growth of the command would be finding, training and holding onto such a large number of qualified people. The Pentagon “is constantly looking to recruit, train and retain world class cyberpersonnel,” a defense official said Sunday.
As part of the expansion, officials said the Pentagon was planning three different forces under Cyber Command: “national mission forces” to protect computer systems that support the nation’s power grid and critical infrastructure; “combat mission forces” to plan and execute attacks on adversaries; and “cyber protection forces” to secure the Pentagon’s computer systems. Cyber Command’s connections to the NSA are also leading some officials to ask how much of the expansion will be focused domestically, especially considering the opening of the NSA’s new, $2 billion Utah Data Center, scheduled to go live later this year. An unnamed "senior defense official" said that the agency’s efforts would remain focused outside US networks, unless it were asked to assist "another agency with domestic authority, such as the FBI." There is significant overlap between Cyber Command and the NSA — until recently, some employees of the former had nsa.gov email addresses, for instance — and there is some doubt that the nascent offshoot of US Strategic Command will be able to achieve true independence under NSA Director Alexander.



-Source (NY Times, Washington Post)







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A Man From India Jailed For Posting "Communal & Inflammatory" Post on Facebook (#Censorship)

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 2/06/2013 07:12:00 pm

A Man From India Jailed For Posting "Communal & Inflammatory" Post on Facebook (#Censorship) 
Freedom of social media in India has been revoked, as the Indian govt has implemented several policy by which they made the social network completely censored. Though this step has been criticized randomly but the decisions has remain unchanged. And the result is in front of us; when a man from Agra get busted. The incident occurs immediately after he made a posts on social networking site Facebook targeting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, union Communications Minister Kapil Sibal and Uttar Pradesh's ruling Samajwadi Party (SP) chief Mulayam Singh Yadav. According to police the post which the man from Agra made violated the policy of Indian govt and that's why it is taken as "communal and inflammatory." the man named Sanjay Chowdhary, a resident of the Dayalbagh suburb of Agra, was arrested late Monday and his laptop, sim card and data card impounded.
Police in Agra, about 360 km from here, said the arrest, which some see as an attempt to muzzle freedom of speech and expression on social networking sites, that the arrest was made on "specific information" about certain "communal and inflammatory" posts by Chowdhary. However, officials here admitted that the "case became hypersensitive after some remarks were made on the SP chief".
Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Agra, Subhash Chandra Dubey said police had acted "purely on law and order basis" in the matter.
"We are not involved in the political angle of the whole issue, our concern were the inflammatory comments and posts on the Facebook wall of this man and we acted to prevent any communal flare up," Dubey told the media. Some officials, however, said the case was "fast tracked" once cartoons lampooning the three leaders were posted on his Facebook wall.
Soon after his arrest, the inflammatory posts were deleted from his Facebook profile and later his account was deactivated. Chowdhury, a civil engineer and chairman of a public school, was booked under sections 153 A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and 66 A of the Information Technology (IT) Act.
"We have arrested him and he is being sent to jail under the due process of law," a police official said.



-Source (Yahoo News)





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Twitter Hacked, More Than 250,000 User Data Compromised

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 2/03/2013 01:55:00 am

Twitter Hacked, More Than 250,000 User Data Compromised

The social networking giant and the world famous micro blogging site Twitter again fallen victim of cyber attack. Last year we have seen that the tight security system if twitter have been compromised many times. Yet again in this year the San Francisco based social media giant who have more than 500 million registered users failed to protect them selves from hackers. On last Friday Twitter acknowledged that it had become the latest victim in a number of cyber-attacks against media companies, saying hackers may have gained access to information on 250,000 of its more than 200 million active users. The micro blogging giant said in a blog posting that earlier this week it detected attempts to gain access to its user data. It shut down one attack moments after it was detected. According to reports usernames, email addresses, session tokens and encrypted/salted passwords for 250,000 users might have been accessed in what it described as a “sophisticated attack” 

"This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident,” said Bob Lord, Twitter’s director of information security. “The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organisations have also been recently similarly attacked” Bob added. 

Jim Prosser, a Twitter spokesman, would not say how hackers infiltrated Twitter’s systems, but Twitter’s blog post said hackers had broken in through a well-publicized vulnerability in Oracle’s Java software. Last month, after a security researcher exposed a serious vulnerability in the software, though Oracle patched the security hole, but Homeland Security said the fix was not sufficient. The DHS issued a rare alert that warned users to disable Java on their computers. Prosser said Twitter was working with government and federal law enforcement to track down the source of the attacks. For now, he said the company had reset passwords for, and notified, every compromised user. The company encouraged users to practice good password hygiene, which typically means coming up with different passwords for different sites, and using long passwords that cannot be found in the dictionary.
Twitter said it “hashed” passwords — which involves mashing up users’ passwords with a mathematical algorithm — and “salted” those, meaning it appended random digits to the end of each hashed password to make it more difficult, but not impossible, for hackers to crack. Once cracked, passwords can be valuable on auction-like black market sites where a single password can fetch $20.

While talking about Twitter and cyber issues, I would like to remind you that in last year twitter faced several cyber attacks where more than 55,000 twitter account details was leaked, after this issue in the middle of last year the social networking giant faced massive denial of service which interrupted its services. Later a huge number of Twitter users across the globe received  emails warning that their account have been compromised and their passwords had been reset, and it was another security breach which affected twitter. Such big organization are not at all careless about security, so as twitter and it has been proved when they hired renowned white hat hacker Charlie Miller to boost up their security, but after this current massacre, it seems that twitter need to think more and emphasize a lot to make sure that their system is good enough to prevent cyber attacks. For all the hot cyber updates and reviews stay tuned with VOGH.


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Chinese Hackers Breached New York Times & Stolen Employee's Password

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 2/03/2013 01:54:00 am

Chinese Hackers Breached New York Times & Stolen Employee's Password 

Yet again the story of cyber espionage by Chinese hackers spotted in the wild, when the famous and one of the most popular American news daily reported that their system has been compromised by a round of sophisticated cyber attack generated from China. After the hack of White House unclassified network, it is the second time in last six month; when Chinese hackers have targeted the American cyber space. The New York Times has reported that for the last four months Chinese hackers have been infiltrating its networks, broken into the email accounts of senior staff, stolen the corporate passwords for every Times employee and used those to gain access to the personal computers of  more than 50 employees. 
According to a blog post of NYT - The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings. Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network. They broke into the e-mail accounts of its Shanghai bureau chief, David Barboza, who wrote the reports on Mr. Wen’s relatives, and Jim Yardley, The Times’s South Asia bureau chief in India, who previously worked as bureau chief in Beijing. 
“Computer security experts found no evidence that sensitive e-mails or files from the reporting of our articles about the Wen family were accessed, downloaded or copied,” said Jill Abramson, executive editor of The Times. The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

Cyber Espionage of China (2011-2012) at a Glance:-
While talking about this cyber attack, we would like to refresh your memory last two years, where the scenario of big cyber attack and espionage by Chinese hackers have been spotted several times. In 2012 Chinese hackers had  breached Telvent's corporate network & gained control of US Power Grid. Also in the middle of last year, we have seen that Chinese hackers have broken into Indian Navy's Computer System & stolen sensitive data. Few months before this hack, Tokyo based computer security firm Trend Micro confirmed that Chinese hackers were responsible for biggest cyber-espionage in India, Japan & Tibet. Also the director of National Security Agency (NSA) General Keith Alexander confirmed that hackers from China was responsible for the serious attack on one of the leading IT security & cyber security company RSA. Also in 2011 China was responsible behind the attack on US Chamber of Commerce, Satellite System of U.S, Nortel Network & so on.  But few days ago National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Center of China (CNCERT/CC), China's primary computer security monitoring network claimed that China fallen victim of one of biggest cyber attacks originated from US, Japan & South Korea. We must have to say that this statement is truly irrelevant. Cyber crime investigator have found that China was directly responsible for the hack into Japan's Biggest Defense Contractor Mitsubishi, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) & Parliament of Japan. In case of South Korea  more than 13 Million of MapleStory players data has been stolen, there also hackers from China was responsible. 
All those above stories it has been clearly identified that China was the point of those said attacks, but it doesn't necessarily prove that it the operation is backed by the Chinese government or intelligence services. It could just as easily be a patriotic group of skilled, independent Chinese hackers upset with how the Western media is portraying their country's rulers. For all kind of cyber related topics and expert reviews on those matters just stay tuned  with only VOGH. 




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3 Russian Cyber Criminal Who Was The Master Mind of Banking Trojan 'Gozi' Charged in New York

Posted by Avik Sarkar On 2/01/2013 08:53:00 pm

3 Russian Cyber Criminal Who Was The Master Mind of Banking Trojan 'Gozi' Charged in New York 

Yet again another serious issue of cyber crime get resolved when the FBI tracked and figured out the master mind of infamous 'Gozi banking Trojan' which effected more than millions of system world wide, including a handful at NASA, leading to tens of millions of dollars in lost banking funds and damages to computer systems and networks. Three alleged international cyber criminals from Russia, responsible for creating and distributing 'Gozi' that infected over one million computers and caused tens of millions of dollars in losses charged in Manhattan Federal Court. Mihai Ionut Paunescu aged 28, a Romanian, Deniss Calovskis, 27, a Latvian, and Nikita Vladimirovich Kuzmin, 25, of the Russian Federation, are charged with computer intrusion, conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud and access device fraud. Federal authorities said the three were arrested last week; Kuzmin is being held in New York, while Paunescu is in custody in Romania and Calovskis in Latvia. 
According to the press release of FBI -Deniss Calovskis, a/k/a “Miami,” a Latvian national who allegedly wrote some of the computer code that made the Gozi virus so effective, was arrested in Latvia in November 2012. Mihai Ionut Paunescu, a/k/a “Virus,” a Romanian national who allegedly ran a “bulletproof hosting” service that enabled cyber criminals to distribute the Gozi virus, the Zeus trojan, and other notorious malware and to conduct other sophisticated cyber crimes, was arrested in Romania in December 2012. 

The cases are being handled by the Complex Frauds Unit of the United States Attorney’s Office. Assistant United States Attorneys Sarah Lai, Nicole Friedlander, and Thomas G.A. Brown, along with Trial Attorney Carol Sipperly of the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Department of Justice on the Paunescu case, are in charge of the prosecution. The charges contained in the Indictments are merely accusations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

DefendantAge and ResidenceChargesMaximum Penalty
Nikita Kuzmin25; Moscow, RussiaConspiracy to commit bank fraud; bank fraud; conspiracy to commit access device fraud; access device fraud; conspiracy to commit computer intrusion; computer intrusion95 years in prison
Deniss Calovskis27; Riga, LatviaConspiracy to commit bank fraud; conspiracy to commit access device fraud; conspiracy to commit computer intrusion; conspiracy to commit wire fraud; conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft67 years in prison
Mihai Ionut Paunescu28; Bucharest, RomaniaConspiracy to commit computer intrusion; conspiracy to commit bank fraud; conspiracy to commit wire fraud60 years in prison


Brief About Gozi:-
The Gozi virus is malicious computer code, or “malware,” that steals personal bank account information, including usernames and passwords, from the users of affected computers. It was named by private sector information security experts in the U.S. who, in 2007, discovered that previously unrecognized malware was stealing personal bank account information from computers across Europe on a vast scale, while remaining virtually undetectable in the computers it infected. To date, the Gozi virus has infected over one million victim computers worldwide, among them at least 40,000 computers in the U.S., including computers belonging to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), as well as computers in Germany, Great Britain, Poland, France, Finland, Italy, Turkey, and elsewhere, and it has caused tens of millions of dollars in losses to the individuals, businesses, and government entities whose computers were infected.

The Gozi virus was distributed to victims’ computers in several different ways. In one method, the virus was disguised as an apparently benign .pdf document which, when opened, secretly installed the Gozi virus on the victim’s computer. Once installed, the Gozi virus—which was intentionally designed to be undetectable by anti-virus software—collected data from the infected computer in order to capture personal bank account information including usernames and passwords. That data was then transmitted to various computer servers controlled by the cyber criminals who used the Gozi virus. These cyber criminals then used the personal bank account information to transfer funds out of the victims’ bank accounts and ultimately into their own personal possession.


For Detailed Information Click Here


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