COLLEGE MOMENT (FRIENDS FOR EVER)

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, 

they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Yesterday brought the beginning,

 tomorrow brings the end,

 and somewhere in the middle we became the best of friends.

"BEWARE OF PHISHING"

What is Phishing?

Phishing is an attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by appearing as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. eBay, PayPal and other online banks are common targets.

Phishing is typically carried out by email or instant messaging and often directs users to enter details at a website, although phone contact has also been used.

Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to fool users. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical measures.

Recent phishing attempts have targeted the customers of banks and online payment services. Social networking sites such as Orkut are also a target of phishing.

Spoofed/Fraudulent e-mails are the most widely used tools to carry out the phishing attack. In most cases we get a fake e-mail that appears to have come from a Trusted Website . Here the hacker may request us to verify username & password by replaying to a given email address.

TECHNIQUES BEHIND PHISHING ATTACK

1. Link Manipulation

Most methods of phishing use some form of technical deception designed to make a link in an email appear to belong to some trusted organization or spoofed organization. Misspelled URLs or the use of subdomains are common tricks used by phishers, such as this example URL

www.micosoft.com
www.mircosoft.com
www.verify-microsoft.com
instead of www.microsoft.com

2. Filter Evasion

Phishers have used images instead of text to make it harder for anti-phishing filters to detect text commonly used in phishing emails. This is the reason Gmail or Yahoo will disable the images by default for incoming mails.

How does a phishing attack/scam look like?

As scam artists become more sophisticated, so do their phishing e-mail messages and pop-up windows. They often include official-looking logos from real organizations and other identifying information taken directly from legitimate Web sites. Here is an example of how the phishing scam email looks like

Example of a phishing e-mail message, including a deceptive URL address linking to a scam Web site.

To make these phishing e-mail messages look even more legitimate, the scam artists may place a link in them that appears to go to the legitimate Web site (1), but it actually takes you to a phishing site (2) or possibly a pop-up window that looks exactly like the official site.

These copycat sites are also called “spoofed” Web sites. Once you’re at one of these spoofed sites, you may send personal information to the hackers.

How to identify a fraudulent e-mail?

Here are a few phrases to look for if you think an e-mail message is a phishing scam.

“Verify your account.”

Legitimate sites will never ask you to send passwords, login names, Social Security numbers, or any other personal information through e-mail.

“If you don’t respond within 48 hours, your account will be closed.”

These messages convey a sense of urgency so that you’ll respond immediately without thinking.

“Dear Valued Customer.”

Phishing e-mail messages are usually sent out in bulk andoften do not contain your first or last name.

“Click the link below to gain access to your account.”

HTML-formatted messages can contain links or forms that you can fill out just as you’d fill out a form on a Web site. The links that you are urged to click may contain all or part of a real company’s name and are usually “masked,” meaning that the link you see does not take you to that address but somewhere different, usually a scam Web site.

Notice in the following example that resting the mouse pointer on the link reveals the real Web address, as shown in the box with the yellow background. The string of cryptic numbers looks nothing like the company’s Web address, which is a suspicious sign.

So the Bottom line to defend from phishing attack is

1. Never assume that an email is valid based on the sender’s email address.

2. A trusted bank/organization such as paypal will never ask you for your full name and password in a PayPal email.

3. An email from trusted organization will never contain attachments or software.

4. Clicking on a link in an email is the most insecure way to get to your account.

 

-- dwijbhargav29@gmail.com

How to use Google for Hacking.

Google serves almost 80 percent of all search queries on the Internet, proving itself as the most popular search engine. However Google makes it possible to reach not only the publicly available information resources, but also gives access to some of the most confidential information that should never have been revealed. In this post I will show how to use Google for exploiting security vulnerabilities within websites. The following are some of the hacks that can be accomplished using Google.

1. Hacking Security Cameras:

There exists many security cameras used for monitoring places like parking lots, college campus, road traffic etc. which can be hacked using Google so that you can view the images captured by those cameras in real time. All you have to do is use the following search query in Google. Type in Google search box exactly as follows and hit enter

inurl:”viewerframe?mode=motion”

Click on any of the search results (Top 5 recommended) and you will gain access to the live camera which has full controls. You will see something as follows

As you can see in the above screenshot, you now have access to the Live cameras which work in real-time. You can also move the cameras in all the four directions, perform actions such as zoom in and zoom out. This camera has really a less refresh rate. But there are other search queries through which you can gain access to other cameras which have faster refresh rates. So to access them just use the following search query.

intitle:”Live View / – AXIS”

Click on any of the search results to access a different set of live cameras. Thus you have hacked Security Cameras using Google.

2. Hacking Personal and Confidential Documents

Using Google it is possible to gain access to an email repository containing CV of hundreds of people which were created when applying for their jobs. The documents containing their Address, Phone, DOB, Education, Work experience etc. can be found just in seconds.

intitle:”curriculum vitae” “phone * * *” “address *” “e-mail”

You can gain access to a list of .xls (excel documents) which contain contact details including email addresses of large group of people. To do so type the following search query and hit enter.

filetype:xls inurl:”email.xls”

Also it’s possible to gain access to documents potentially containing information on bank accounts, financial summaries and credit card numbers using the following search query

intitle:index.of finances.xls

3. Hacking Google to gain access to Free Stuffs

Ever wondered how to hack Google for free music or ebooks. Well here is a way to do that. To download free music just enter the following query on google search box and hit enter.

“?intitle:index.of?mp3 eminem“

Now you’ll gain access to the whole index of eminem album where in you can download the songs of your choice. Instead of eminem you can subtitute the name of your favorite album. To search for the ebooks all you have to do is replace “eminem” with your favorite book name. Also replace “mp3″ with “pdf” or “zip” or “rar”.

I hope you enjoy this post. Pass your comments. Cheers!