Archive for May, 2008
RIM unable to honor India Gov demand
Canadian wireless device company, Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the popular Blackberry handheld communication device, has finally broken the silence surrounding Indian Government’ demands to handover the “keys” to decrypt secure email communications.
RIM claims that it not possible to handover the decryption keys and claims setting up a local datacenter would serve no purpose given the end-to-end security deployed in its solution. RIM further declared that its solution architecture is designed in a way that does not allow any third party including RIM to read the email data under any circumstances. Read the rest of this entry
A Google for your network infrastructure?
Paglo, a totally free “world’s first search engine for IT”, is a web-based service that lets IT professionals search their own IT infrastructure assets. I signed up for the beta in November last year but only received the invitation earlier this month.
Information about the target network is gathered by a software agent, Paglo crawler, which installs on a standard computer connected to the network. The crawler can put together an exhaustive set of information about network hosts with information such as device type, device name, IP address, installed software, disk space usage and so on. The crawler uploads the information to Paglo’s data center for storage and indexing. This information can later be retrieved through a web-based interface. Read the rest of this entry
Stealth tcp port scanning
Port scanning is carried out by both hackers and information security professionals alike to probe network hosts and discover active services. Port scanning is often instrumental in exploiting potential vulnerabilities that exist in services running on a host; hence the reason for stealth port scans that try to evade firewall/IDS devices.
Although today’s IDS can pick up almost any type of traditional stealth scans, IDS or firewall evasion does exist and is commonly performed by using packet fragmentation or by using proxy hosts. This article looks at how these basic tcp stealth scans work. Read the rest of this entry
Personal details of over 7m Chileans leaked
Personal information of almost half the national population of Chile was leaked on the Internet at about 1:30 AM CLT on Saturday, May 10th.
The names, addresses, academic and social status information along with other details were uploaded to the popular file-sharing website, rapidshare.com and a Chilean file sharing site, compartelo.cl. The download links to three files were posted on the public forums on FayerWayer.com, the popular Chilean technology blog.
The information is reportedly obtained from Government bodies: the Dirección General de Movilización Nacional (Directorate of National Mobilization) - DGMN, the Servicio Electoral (Electoral Service) - SERVEL, the Ministry of Education - Mineduc. It also contains over 2 million telephone records for 849 cities in Chile
According to the conservative Chilean news agency, El Mercurio, police are still investigating the leaked information to confirm the hacker’s claims.
