Indian tribe Domain Name Issue

Indian tribe Domain Name Issue
MIAMI, FL :  A Florida Indian tribe is considering a lawsuit against a
former bodyguard who has staked claims to Web domain names.
Steve Thiele has registered www.miccosukeetribeofindians.com and
www.miccosukeetribeofindiansofflorida.com. Thiele said he wants
$500,000 from the tribe, while the Miccosukee have offered him amounts
that started at $5,000 and have hit

Gurgaon police arrest five cyber cafe owners

The
Gurgaon police Monday arrested five cyber cafe owners for failing to
install closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV) in their cafes and for
not maintaining the identity records of customers.The action follows
increased vigil after the recent serial bomb blasts in Bangalore and
Ahmedabad and increasing instances of terrorist outfits using cyber
cafes to send e-mails, a police spokesman said.The arrests were made
after raids on 35 cyber cafes Monday in this township that adjoins the
national capital.In another development, the Gurgaon police has decided
to install 500 closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras all over the
township.A police spokesman Monday said the cameras will be installed
on national highways, roundabouts, parks, shopping malls, prominent
high-rise buildings and other public places across the township.About
30 CCTV cameras have already been installed and 500 more will be
installed shortly, he added.

-IANS

Cyber Squatting

The practice of purchasing a domain name that contains a well-known
trademark or commercial name (for example, indiatimes.com) is called
Cyber squatting. The cyber squatter then offers to sell the domain to
the person or company who owns a trademark contained within the name at
an inflated price. The term is derived from "squatting" which is the
act of occupying an abandoned or unoccupied space that the squatter
does not own, rent or otherwise have permission to use. Cyber squatting
however is a bit different in that the domain names that are being
"squatted" are (sometimes but not always) being paid for through the
registration process by the cyber squatters. Cyber squatters usually
ask for prices far greater than that at which they purchased it. Some
cyber squatters put up derogatory remarks about the person or company
the domain is meant to represent in an effort to encourage the subject
to buy the domain from them This practice is being contested in various
legal battles and for the most part, the company wins, not the cyber
squatter.

Cyber Forensic Tools made in India

Cyber forensics is an emerging investigation science that aims to
uncover evidence by extracting data from computers, personal data
assistants (PDAs) or even a smartphone. Efforts by a state-run agency
to develop a homegrown computer forensics software have come into the
limelight after the alleged involvement of two Indians in a failed
terrorist attack on the Glasgow Airport last month.
CyberCheck, a
software product developed by the cyber-forensics team of the Centre
for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is being used by police
officials at Bangalore, home to one of the Glasgow suspects, Khafeel
Ahmed, to analyse and mine the computer that he used while visiting his
parents in India’s tech capital. The investigation success, C-DAC
officials hope, will draw attention on the products built at its
five-year-old cyber forensics centre in Thiruvananthapuram.
Cyber
forensics is an emerging investigation science that aims to uncover
evidence by extracting data from computers, personal data assistants
(PDAs) or even a smartphone. It involves finding data, preserving it
and presenting it in a manner acceptable in a court.
Internationally,
encryption, forensics and related software often fall under tight
government regulations, which clamp down on its exports and mandate
embedding loopholes that agencies of the originating country can use to
access data where ever it is sold and used.
C-DAC has investigated
around 110 cases, including a case where threatening emails were sent
to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and senior government officials,
involving cyber crimes such as forgery, fraud, hacking, “phishing” and
cheating. It has assisted state police departments, the Central Bureau
of Investigation (CBI) and the Indian Army.
With the increasing use
of computers, cellphones, satellite phones and the Internet by
terrorists and other criminal elements, C-DAC scientists see an
increasing demand for cyber forensic products.
“Currently, most of
the crimes reported, whether cyber or otherwise have digital evidence
in the form of computer hard discs, mobile phones, PDA devices and
digital cameras. As more and more people buy these devices, misuse is
on the rise, which means there is going to be large potential for cyber
forensics tools in India,” said Bhadran V.K., joint director at C-DAC’s
Resource Centre for Cyber Forensics in Thiruvananthapuram.
The local
seller of “Encase”, a forensics software of Pasadena, Guidance Software
Inc., agrees. “The Indian cyber forensics market is a hugely potential
market. It is like a 100-storey building and where we are at now, we
haven’t even begun building the ground floor. Just one or two players
cannot make that 100-storey building and we want more people in this
field,” said S. Venkatesan, director of Labs System India Pvt. Ltd, a
reseller in India for Encase.
C-DAC’s products face competition from
established US companies such as Guidance Software, Pleasant Grove,
Utah-based Paraben Corp., Chatsworth, Intelligent Computer Solutions,
Inc. and Digital Intelligence Inc. The Indian agency is using the plank
of affordability to hawk its wares.
Encase, used by both government
agencies and private customers such as audit firms Ernst & Young,
as also the likes of Wipro Ltd, is priced between Rs1.5 lakh and Rs3
lakh for a single licence and, Rs1 crore and above for enterprises of
more than about 6,000 users. In contrast, C-DAC’s CyberCheck sells for
Rs30,000 a licence and has sold about 100 copies in India. “Our
advantage is that we have designed and developed these products in
India,” Bhadran said.

PASSWORD? Unprotected

Ethical hacking. Could there be a bigger oxymoron? But as Abhijeet
Parandekar ushered me into his lab in the Asian School of Cyber Laws,
Pune, he showed no signs of guilt. “This is my playground. I work for
eight hours here and play after that,” he said with a grin. It was
after much coaxing that the computer expert had agreed to share his
secrets and teach me to hack “with ethics”.

For Abhijeet, to be
an ethical hacker is to be the good guy. You attack a security system
on behalf of its owners, looking for weak links that a malicious hacker
could exploit. In short, you know all the low tricks but use them for a
better cause. And, from my experience of interviewing an ethical hacker
a year ago, I also know that they are, well, quite cool. “I will first
teach you how to hack passwords, then how to hack documents and then
how to hack a computer,” he said with surprising matter-of-factness.

So,
we made an MS Word document, which he asked me to lock with a password.
“It could be anything,” he said. “Fly,” I said. To hack, you need the
right software. (Abhijeet refused to disclose the name of the software
we were using. So if you thought I ran out of the lab and into the
exciting life of a hacker, you are mistaken.)

On the desktop in
front of me, were numerous tools—with names like the Horse Riding, the
Action and the Bleak Reader. I chose the first and clicked. In a few
hundred seconds, the device dived into the sea of words that had been
keyed into the system and fished out five. The third was “fly”. “Oh,
god. It’s actually happening,” I said. “Yes, and it can happen in many
more ways,” said Abhijeet primly. “This technique compares each word in
the dictionary with the password and matches it,” he says.

More
mock hacking. I created documents, locked them with passwords and then
prised them open. But before I got ideas about a life in crime,
Abhijeet intruded to point out how each password that I had managed to
crack was first given out by me. “People give out passwords on their
own through different ways and the software helps us trace them. It’s
near impossible to break into accounts,” he says.

Lesson 2: how
to gatecrash systems. The software at my disposal were Digit Byte and
Counterfoil. “ What you have to do here is make a fake document out of
original icons like MSWord, Internet or Photoshop and email it to the
user. The moment he clicks on it, you will have access to his computer
from your machine,” he says.
I was hooked. So I made a fake Word
document, exported it to the neighbouring computer, clicked on it and
came back to my seat to watch some fun. It worked. I could see all the
documents, the desktop icons and even the view through the web camera.
And, mind you, the web camera on the other computer was turned off.

By
now, I had turned into the child who wants all the toys in the shop.
So, I asked Abhijeet to go to the next step. And there I was, shutting
the monitor of the neighbouring computer, opening its disc drive and
shaking its screen—all while sitting on my seat. Believe me, I felt
like a small cyber megalomaniac.
But Abhijeet did not really care
for my self-assuring smirk. “I’ve taught you just three or four tools.
There are some 50 like this,” he said.

It was time soon for
Abhijeet to return to his playground. I walked back with a buzzing head
and told myself, “Change your password, girl!”

Mirror, mirror on the wall

It
took guts for Rashmi Sinha (name changed) to register a complaint at
the Tangra police station in Kolkata against a shop assistant for
taking her pictures from beneath the trial room door. The shop
assistant, Sunil Kumar Jha, was eventually arrested.
Last year, two
MMS clips made the rounds of mobile phones: one was of a girl changing
inside the trial room of a renowned Kolkata departmental store and the
other showed a girl and a boy of the same department store making love
inside a trial room.
Complaints of hidden cameras in lingerie stores
are common. A school teacher shopping in Kolkata’s New Market spotted
one when she was looking for a hook to hang her clothes: “The lamp was
missing but there was a small camera.” She did not raise an alarm but
never entered the store again.
Though the Constitution has included
the right to convict a person committing such a crime, there is no
specific law under which he can be punished. “The punishment depends on
the gravity of the offence, which depends on the evidence,” said
Vaidehi Limaye, a student of cyber laws at Government Law College. A
case can be filed under Section 509 of Indian Penal Code subject to
fulfilling some conditions.
Not everyone takes up such incidents
with the police. Take the recent incident in Mumbai when an HT
correspondent ran into a woman who had caught an assistant in a
prominent sports apparel store taking pictures of her in the trial
room. The woman chose not to file a police complaint. Her father told
Hindustan Times that they did not want “legal hassles” and would leave
it to the media to take up the issue. Even though the Hindustan Times
report led to the shop assistant’s arrest, the management has not even
taken steps to post women attendants outside the changing room.
Despite
electronic gadgets taking voyeurism to new dimensions, the Information
Technology Act under which most of the cases are registered has serious
lacunae.
The famous Pune cases, which sparked a debate about the
need for amendments to the IT act to cover voyeurism, have yet to
produce results in court. In the first case, the manager of a swimming
pool at Sahakar Nagar and a peon were arrested on September 12, 2003,
for installing a web camera in the changing room. Two years later,
Mohan Kulkarni, a landlord from the Navi Peth area, was arrested for
using a camera to spy on his women tenants.
On their part, store
managements claim their trial rooms are safe. Big Bazaar says the
controls for their electronic gadgets are in the managers’ cabin, which
remains locked in their absence.
The Wills Lifestyle management said
their trial rooms have large doors with wooden slats, which means the
customer has an outside view but no one can look inside. Following the
Hindustan Times report, stores in Mumbai have become vigilant.
Kapsons owner Vipin Kapoor said they have posted guards outside changing rooms.
But
there are some who would rather be safe than sorry. Kolkata’s actress
and model June Malliah never uses trial rooms: “Mirrors in trial rooms
are tricky because someone can see you from the other side.”

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print.aspx?Id=a17c3cd2-a9b4-4b47-9600-d6f4b4fcdb9c

Is Internet causing suicides in IIT?

he Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K) has blamed enormous
Internet surfing and constant use of mobile phones by the students for increasing number of suicides on
the campus which recently reached to the figure of six. In a reply to a
Right to Information (RTI) application filed by the institute's alumni
association, the premier institute said that as students are in regular
touch with their family members, friends and relatives, several
thoughts occupy them. This in turn, at times, disturbs the students,
who do not get peaceful time to study. And later, they take the extreme
step for not performing well in the exams. Earlier, when the mobile
phones were not so popular, the students were not able to stay in touch
with their families and hence got time to study. Also, Internet surfing
exposes the students to several sites having information that can cause
a negative impact on the minds, leading students to suicides, officials
added. Isn't it strange to digest the fact that 'technology' is playing
havoc in India's premier 'technology' institute. Do you feel that net
surfing and mobile chat is to be really blamed for the rising toll of
suicides in IIT-K or is it yet another way by which IIT-K officials are
trying ti pass the buck and get the burden off their shoulders.

Mumbai: Orkut in net again for cyber crime

In
another case of cyber crime that brings Orkut into focus, an engineer
was arrested for posting on the website the name and telephone number
of his neighbour.A housewife from Bandra in Mumbai's western suburb is
the latest victim to what she calls cyber evil. Lisa Ferrera was
shocked to see her phone number on Orkut, describing her as a
commercial sex worker and the person who posted this profile was her
neighbour Mohammed Ali.

''We
had a dispute about a plot and this is what he did. I am mentally
harassed,'' said Lisa.After Lisa and her husband filed a complaint, Ali
was arrested and is currently under police custody.However, this is
only the latest in a series of cyber crimes - small and major - that
has kept the newly formed cyber cell of Mumbai police busy.

Just
last month, a man in Mahim was arrested for posting his neighbour's
profile on Orkut.And in August 2007, young Adan Patrawala was kidnapped
and killed by a man he befriended online.

It
was a high profile case that led the Mumbai police to speak with Google
tighten their act.But police say this form of new age crime, committed
by white collared professionals, is not only steadily on the rise but
also difficult to detect and stop.

Crimes Through Internet

There are reports of criminals committing economic frauds through phishing, e-mail scams, piracy, data theft and launching of denial of service attacks onto targeted organizations, network infrastructures and countries, using internet services.

‘Police’ being a State subject, it is primarily the concern of the State Governments to modernize their forces and to establish cyber police stations for cyber crime investigation. At the same time, the Ministry of Home Affairs is implementing a project called Common Integrated Police Application (CIPA) in all the States in a phased manner, under the Modernization of State Police Forces (MPF) Scheme. It is envisaged to widen the scope of CIPA project in terms of the applications and by extending it from the police stations to the other higher-level formations in the police hierarchy, and provide network connectivity. The Government has set up Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) to provide reactive and proactive support to the cyber incidents in India, besides, introducing a Bill to amend the Information Technology Act, 2000, in the Lok Sabha on 15.12.2006 to provide for insertion of legal provisions to address various computer crimes.

Action urged on child abuse sites

A concerted international effort could see the end of websites that profit by selling images of child sex abuse, a leading action group has said.

The UK's Internet Watch Foundation conducted research to identify how many sites trade such images and concluded there are 2,755 such sites worldwide.

Of these, 80% are judged to be fully commercial operations.

The IWF said this "manageable" number could be eliminated if net firms, governments and police worked together.

Closing sites

The IWF, which identifies and shuts down UK hosts of child abuse images, said it carried out the research to quantify the scale of the problem.

Before now, said a spokeswoman for the IWF, uninformed speculation about sites that trade and traffic in images of child sexual abuse caused many to think the problem was impossible to tackle.

"We think 2,755 is a manageable number," said the spokeswoman. "We are now asking for a worldwide effort to go in and really combat this issue."

The figure of 2,755 had been static for the last three years, said the spokeswoman, though these sites typically moved country and host regularly to stay one step ahead of attempts to shut them down.

She added that the work of the IWF - alongside net firms, law enforcement agencies and government - has meant that fewer than 1% of child abuse sites are hosted in Britain.

The IWF also shared its list of sites hosting image of child sex abuse with net firms so Britons do not stumble over the sites inadvertently and can block efforts to reach them.

Similar work internationally could see the closing of most of these publicly available sites, said the spokeswoman.

"It would make it much harder for criminals to make money from the crime and thereby combat the problem," she said.

This would take co-ordination by a transnational body because the sites hopped to hosting firms in different countries so often.

Nobody has yet come forward to take on the problem, said the spokeswoman.

The research into child abuse sites was contained in the IWF's annual report in which it revealed its evidence helped convict seven paedophiles and that it had contributed information for a further 13 investigations.

Paypal to block 'unsafe browsers'

Web payment firm Paypal has said it will block "unsafe browsers" from using its service as part of wider anti-phishing efforts.

Customers will first be warned that a browser is unsafe but could then be blocked if they continue using it.

Paypal said it was "an alarming fact that there is a significant set of users who use very old and vulnerable browsers such as Internet Explorer 4".

Phishing attacks trick users into handing over sensitive data.

Paypal said some users were still using Internet Explorer 3 , released more than 10 years ago. It lacks many of the security and safety features needed to protect users from phishing and other online attacks.

Legitimate sites

Paypal said it supported the use of Extended Validation SSL Certificates. Browsers which support the technology highlight the address bar in green when users are on a site that has been deemed legitimate.

The latest version of Internet Explorer support EV SSL certificates, while Firefox 2 supports it with an add-on but Apple's Safari browser for Mac and PCs does not.

"By displaying the green glow and company name, these newer browsers make it much easier for users to determine whether or not they're on the site that they thought they were visiting," said Paypal.

The steps were outlined in a white paper on managing phishing, written by the firm's chief information security officer Michael Barrett and Dan Levy, director of risk management.

In it, they said: "In our view letting users view the PayPal site on [an unsafe] browser is equal to a car manufacturer allowing drivers to buy one of their vehicles without seatbelts."

Paypal described the battle against phishing as a "fast-moving chess match with the criminal community".

Techie sues cell co, police

A Bangalore-based software engineer, Lakshmana Kailash K, who was wrongly jailed for 50 days last year by the Pune police cyber cell, has demanded Rs 20 crore in damages and slapped a legal notice on telecom giant Bharti Airtel, principal secretary (Home) Maharashtra government and assistant commissioner of police (financial & cyber crime unit), Pune police.

Lakshmana had been falsely accused of an internet crime - posting unseemly pictures of Chattrapati Shivaji on the web - and was arrested based on the internet protocol address provided by his internet service provider, Bharti. As it turned out, the IP address was not his.

But by the time the police confirmed this and acted on it, he had already spent 50 harrowing days at the Yerwada Jail with hardened criminals, had tasted lathi beatings and was made to use one bowl to both eat and for the toilet.

Lakshmana’s nightmare, first reported in TOI on Nov 3, 2007, sparked condemnation on the web with internet communities posting their outrage. The techie’s 10-page legal notice, a copy of which has been sent to the NHRC, vents anger at the way in which the police and judicial system made nonsense of his rights and highlights the degrading conditions within the jail.