India overtakes US as biggest virus producer

increase font size

click to see full-size image

India has overtaken the US as the single biggest producer of viruses, according to analysis of internet threats by Network Box. India is now responsible for 13.74 per cent of the world’s viruses, up from 9.5 per cent in July. Russia is the next in line, producing just over 11 per cent of viruses - a jump from last month’s 4.01 per cent.The U.S. accounts for just over eight per cent, a significant decrease from 14.65 per cent last month. Virus levels from the UK have dropped to 2.5 p...

er cent; down from five per cent last month. The UK is now the seventh-largest threat producing country in the world (down from fourth last month). The highest number of firewall blocks come from the U.S. (18.3 per cent) and Korea (13 per cent). Simon Heron, internet security analyst for Network Box, says: “It is interesting to see that UDP:137 (NetBIOS’ name service) was the second most attacked port. It is obviously worth users and businesses checking their firewall rules as these figures indicate that there must still be systems out there with this port open to the internet. Also, it would appear that web proxies are also worth probing as TCP:8080 was third in the list, which suggests that hackers see this as another backdoor.”
Heron continues: “The country sources of these internet threats shifts each month, which shows how quickly internet criminals can move their operations round the world and launch attacks. Businesses need to be vigilant and ensure they are not opening up the back door to a hacker when they use new applications or technologies. From this month’s statistics, it would appear that proxies are seen as vulnerable.”

Facebook Tips and Tools

Tag Friends in Your Status and Posts
One of the most popular features on Facebook is tagging, which gives you the ability to identify and reference people in photos, videos and notes. Today, we are adding a new way to tag people and other things you're connected to on Facebook — in status updates and other posts from the Publisher. It's another way to let people know who and what you're talking about.

People often update their status to reflect their thoughts and feelings, or to mention things they feel like sharing. Sometimes that includes referencing friends, groups or even events they are attending — for instance, posting "Grabbing lunch with Meredith Chin" or "I'm heading to Starbucks Coffee Company — anyone want some coffee?".

Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend's name to something you are posting, just include the "@" symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you'll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The "@" symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you've added your tags.

Friends you tag in your status updates will receive a notification and a Wall post linking them to your post. They also will have the option to remove tags of themselves from your posts. We hope that tagging your status updates and others posts from the Publisher will enable you to share in a more meaningful and engaging way, and connect with even more people. We're rolling this feature out over the course of the next few weeks, so you may not see the new feature just yet.


Search Facebook like a pro

Not everybody knows how powerful Facebook search is. Similar to any large search engine, Facebook search has a lot of advanced options to help you search like a pro. For example if you are looking for a person named John Marsh and filter your results down to only people who are married, you can try name: John Marsh status:married.




Advanced Wall {Install}




Advanced wall is also another facebook application that I’ve installed lately. Instead of posting messages through the default options, you can post images, images, graffiti, videos, flash, change text size and color, along with many other things using the simple WYSIWYG editor.


Download facebook videos

Facebook has one of the largest collection of user uploaded videos.You can download most of the videos from Facebook by using a client like SpeedBit or DownFacbook.



Download Facebook Photo Albums

FacePAD: Facebook Photo Album Downloader allows you to download your friends’ facebook albums, Events albums, and Group Albums, en masse, with the click of a button.





Friend Lists: Now in Chat - Remove unwanted

Since launched Facebook Chat, many of you have asked for ways to organize your connections and to control which friends see you online. Maybe you want to be online with your best friends but offline with your work colleagues. You can now do that by using Friend Lists to filter your connections in Chat.

Friend Lists let you group friends to more easily share with and view information from specific sets of people. You already can use them to filter your home page, send Inbox messages and manage privacy settings.

From the bottom right corner of your browser, go online with Chat and choose which lists you'd like to include in the Chat pane. You can use your existing lists or create new lists directly from Chat.

Creating Lists
To create a new list, simply select the "Friend Lists" menu on the Chat pane, enter a new list name, and drag the names of people you want to include into the list. You can exclude lists from Chat by unchecking them in the "Friend Lists" menu. If you don't want your friends grouped in Chat at all, you can simply uncheck all the Friend Lists, and you'll then see your friends listed alphabetically.

If some of your friends aren't in a Friend List yet, they'll be included under "Other Friends."

Going Offline
Alongside each list, you'll notice a green switch; when you turn off the switch, you'll be logging off of Chat for that list. Friends in lists that are switched off will not be able to see that you are online or chat with you, nor will you be able to see whether they are online.

Friend Lists are useful in organizing and filtering your experience on Facebook, especially as you have more friends from different parts of your life. To learn about other ways to use them on the site, watch this recent video tutorial.

TO DELETE:

1. Click on Accounts
2. Click edit friends
3. On the left, about half way down you will see the category "Lists"
4. Click on the list you want to delete
5. Click on "Delete List"
6. Confirm by clicking "Delete List"

Access Facebook Chat on Desktop

You can use Gabtastik and digsby to keep Facebook chat sessions open on your Windows desktop without use of web browser

How to Delete, Cancel and Terminate Facebook Account and Profile

A simple guide to terminate, delete or cancel Facebook account, together with the Facebook profile easily.

Web Server Hacking Techniques

Lots of people know use, configure and manage their webservers but only few of them really know how to protect their web server from getting hacked i.e making it hack proof. Today lots of websites are hosted on a dedicated web servers so it's extremely important to make your web server hack proof in order to prevent any theft and data loss, Before I mention techniques used by hackers to compromise a web server and how you can protect your web server you should know what a web server is and how it works.
What is a webserver?

Basically a webserver is a single computer or more used to host websites, For a website to be available to every one (connected to internet) 24/7 it needs to be hosted on a webserver

How webservers work?

Webservers work in a simple manner, When ever you are using browser to surf any page your browser will request that particular page from the webserver and the server sends back the requested page.

 

The above picture illustrates how a webserver works.

How Are Webservers Compromised Or hacked?

There are multiple reasons why a webserver gets compromised or hacked, one of the major reason is installing the webserver with default and lack of updates and weak passwords. Once the server is compromised the hacker can use it to do malicious things online. For Example Hacked webservers can be used to as zombies to for performing a more powerful DDOS attack

Webserver Hacking Techniques

Below mentioned are some of the techniques which can be used by malicious hackers to compromise a webserver.

Orthodox Password Cracking Techniques

1. A hacker can use variety of password Cracking Techniques such as Brute force, Dictionary attacks and rainbow tables to crack weak administrator account passwords, However these attacks create huge logs of presence, so therefore smarter hackers either use a proxy or any other iP hiding method or they use already compromised systems to perform the attack.

2. Man In The Middle Attack

A hacker can also perform a man in the middle attack also known as ARP poisoning to steal credentials of administrator account.

3.  Keyloggers And Trojans

If A hacker can manage to install a trojan or a keylogger on administrator's computer then, the malicious hacker can easily capture the credentials

4. DNS Cache Poisoning Attack

If a hacker can manage to insert fake address records for a domain name into DNS server and can make the webserver accept the fake address record then the hacker or intruder can easily control your browser, This attack is extremely dangerous as it happens without the users knowledge, The topic is quite big and is not possible to explain it here, depending upon readers response I might make a seprate tutorial on this attack

There are many other techniques used by hackers such as Ftp server intrusion, social engineering, exploiting web application bugs which are probably to be explained in the upcoming posts at rha.

Hope you have enjoyed reading the post and have probably got some idea how hackers can attack your web server, In the next post I will continue the series and will introduce some methods you can use to protect your webserver from getting compromised.

Learn how to hack with the Hackers academy

How to hack?, I get this question asked daily, Lots of people are curious to learn Ethical hacking but they do not know where to start, Any one can become a fairly good Ethical Hacker if he/she can learn from basics and he/she should have a place to practice what he learned

This is where The Hacker's Academy comes into play, If you are a beginner or intermediate or advanced this is still for you, The Hackers Academy is one of the most professional online Ethical Hacking and penetration testing institute, one of the best parts of hackers academy i like is that they give you labs(A place where you can practice) so you can try the concepts for your self

The course will contain of audio recording and video recordings but the most important part is that once you are a member of hackers academy they will tell you exactly how you can create Labs so you can practice what you have learned.

 

Facebook expected to roll out simple privacy settings within the next few weeks

Facebook is preparing to release simple privacy settings following a meeting last week with its staff.

According to the allfacebook.com website, Facebook’s public policy director Tim Sparapani spoke with American radio journalist Kojo Nnamdi and stated that the company would release simple privacy settings in the coming weeks.
Wired reported that Sparapani said: “Now we’ve heard from our users that we have gotten a little bit complex, I think we are going to work on that. We are going to be providing options for users who want simplistic bands of privacy that they can choose from and I think we will see that in the next couple of weeks.”
It claimed that proposed changes are unlikely to reverse its December policy changes to make large portions of a user’s profile ‘publicly available’ by ‘helping everyone find and connect with each other by keeping some information – like your name and profile picture’.
He told Nnamdi on Washington DC’s WAMU station that Facebook was dedicated to privacy. He said: “We have built a privacy setting for every new type of sharing [users] are allowed to have. What that means is that in fact we have come up with an extraordinary number of privacy settings.
“This should be compared to almost any other company out there where there are no privacy settings at all, so Facebook should be getting credit here for giving tools in the first place.”
Blogger Nick O’Neill, writing on allfacebook.com, said: “Given that the company has come under significant pressure over the past couple of weeks over new programs, including the highly controversial ‘Instant Personalisation’ program, it’s not surprising to hear Sparapani announce these features. What’s even more significant is that these ‘simple’ privacy settings sound as though they’ve most likely been in the works for a short period of time.
“What I’m still wondering is why Mark Zuckerberg or any other executive haven’t made a formal announcement stating that they are listening. While representatives of the company’s communications department have stated that the company is listening and will effectively do the right thing, no formal statement has come from Mark Zuckerberg.
“Perhaps this is a test of Mark’s ability to delegate some of the communication to the general public, however I’m pretty sure that most people want to hear that the company is listening from Mark’s own mouth (or at least a blog post under his name).”
Benjamin Cohen, technology correspondent at Channel4 News, claimed that Facebook clearly realises that not everyone understands the 50 privacy settings and 170 privacy options that users are currently presented with and are confusing users and not everyone has realised that their status updates are so public.
He said: “The company are still in discussions internally about how best to implement new changes, but it is clear that some simplification will occur soon. There was talk of big privacy options that change scores of privacy settings rather than having to set them individually.
“Facebook as a company are refreshing in their ability to actually respond to criticism. They don’t shy away from it as other technology giants have a tendency to. They are, I think still genuinely taken by surprise at the way that people use Facebook and more importantly the information they upload. Users are their lifeblood, if they upset them then they risk their whole future existence. They’ve realised that there’s unease and they will change things.”
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said: “If the reports are accurate, the question everyone will be asking is whether Facebook is really prepared to make the radical changes necessary to satisfy the growing number of users concerned with privacy on the site?
“Or will users believe that the changes are cosmetic and do not go far enough and, ultimately, quit the site altogether? Certainly, from my own point of view, Facebook needs to take a fundamental shift in its approach. Rather than asking users to ‘opt-out’ from sharing their information with more and more of the internet, they should ask their almost 500 million members to explicitly choose to ‘opt-in’.”

Ultimate guide to Windows 7 security

Windows 7 has been warmly received and swiftly adopted by businesses, with the result that many IT admins are now struggling with the platform’s new security features. In addition to changes to User Account Control, BitLocker, and other features inherited from Windows Vista, Windows 7 introduces a slew of security capabilities that businesses will want to take advantage of.

Windows 7 improves on Vista with a friendlier UAC mechanism, the ability to encrypt removable media and hard drive volumes, broader support for strong cryptographic ciphers, hassle-free secure remote access, and sophisticated protection against Trojan malware in the form of AppLocker, to name just a few.
In this guide, I’ll run through these and other significant security enhancements in Windows 7, and provide my recommendations for configuring and using them. I’ll pay especially close attention to the new AppLocker application control feature, which may be a Windows shop’s most practical and affordable way to combat socially engineered Trojan malware.
New and improved
Windows 7 has literally hundreds of security changes and additions, far too many to cover in one fell swoop. While this guide focuses on the ones that most organizations will be interested in, keep in mind that plenty of others may deserve your attention. A few the biggies not discussed here are built-in support for smart cards and biometrics, the ability to force the use of Kerberos in a feature called Restrict NTLM, and support for the new DNSSec standards, which are becoming essential to prevent DNS exploitation attacks. Also noteworthy is a new feature called Extended Protection for Authentication, which prevents many sophisticated man-in-the-middle attacks that can strike at some of our most trusted security protocols (such as SSL and TLS).
User Account Control
A Windows Vista feature that users loved to hate, User Account Control has been significantly improved to be both less intrusive and smarter at distinguishing between legitimate and potentially malicious activities in Windows 7. However, depending on whether you are logged on as administrator or a standard user, some installs of Windows 7 may have a default UAC security setting that’s one level lower than some experts (including yours truly) recommend. Standard users have UAC security default to the most secure setting, while administrator accounts reside a notch below the highest setting, which is potentially riskier.
Note too that, although UAC provides a much-needed mechanism to prevent the misuse of administrator privileges, it can be bypassed. If you need high security, users should not log on with an elevated user account until they need it.
Your domain environment should already be at the highest and most secure level (“Always notify”). If it isn’t, make it so. That way, users will be prompted to input their passwords to perform high risk administrative actions. No matter what else, UAC should be enabled.