Data scientist - The new generation workforce

What is big data?

Large enterprises are congregating electronic data from assorted sensors, and electronic devices, which are of different formats, with the use of independent or connected applications. This data inflow has outpaced the firm’s efficacy to process, analyze, store, correlate and understand the captured datasets. This new voluminous dataflow which doesn’t fit into the ambit of decorous data processing techniques has been nicknamed as big data. It has carved itself with a home in this dynamic and expanding information ecosystem that many companies struggle to manage today. Mckinsey Global institute ascribes “Big data” to datasets whose size is above the dexterity of archetypal database software tools to capture, store, manage, and analyze.

Safety Over the Net -May 2013

As a blog dedicated to bring in visibility on Security, specialized security concerns, security events across different locations, It was interesting to be a part of the event Safety over the net organized by ITMR along with CYSI. A small writeup of the event is shared in the following paragraphs.

Cyber warriors - India initiatives

The year 1820,  recorded the first cyber crime in the context of technology at that point in time. In nearly two decades, cyber crime has emerged as a giant affecting the lives of millions of Internet users across the world. Be it leading actress declaring that someone created a false profile on www.facebook.com, young girls unwittingly getting caught in the web of embezzlement of funds through e-commerce, or even  personal e-mail passwords being hacked. The story remains the same worldwide. 

Cyber security has emerged as a crucial element of national defense for India. This realization has emerged in the wake of many glaring cyber issues and security problems faced by India.  Cyber security challenges of India have become a series issue that the highest echelons of Indian government has initiated dialog on these areas.  The national security administration is has expressed its concern  about increasing levels of security breaches and attacks through computers, mobiles and other devices.

Waledac botnet - Operation b49

Waledac is a botnet which was deployed world wide for illegal operations. One of the 10 largest botnets in the US and a major distributor of spam globally, Survey puts an estimate that Waledac has infected hundreds of thousands of computers around the world. Waledac  is capable of generating about 1.5 billion spam email messages a day, and is well-known for its online pharmacy, phony products, jobs, and penny stock spam scams. Waledac is considered to be the second version of the famous Storm. The worm may arrive on the computer as an attachment to spam email or via a link to a malicious Web site says Symantec. WALEDAC built its communication tactic by using an HTTP-based P2P communication network codenamed  HTTP2P and uses a complex variation of known technologies, including RSA and AES encryption using OpenSSL, an eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based message structure, bzip2 compression, and Base64 encoding says Trend micro. Botnets are deployed in a multitier architecture with the command and control center as the node. The CC is connected to, what is called as repeater nodes or tier of the Waledac botnet and is typically composed of infected computers with public IP addresses reachable on TCP port 80.

As discussed in the earlier articles, botnets are the modern tools preferred by cyber criminals to carryout  a variety of cyber attacks, build on the distributed power of lakhs of malware-infected recruited computers spread around the world to generate spam, carryout denial-of-service attacks on selected websites, including malware deployment and management apart from click frauds and other criminal activities. Waledac was believed to have the capacity to generate about 1.5 billion spam emails per day. Waledac infection data is presented at sudosecure.net. The enclosed image courtesy blogs.technet and microsoft.com very clearly indicates the levels of infection present in India.

PlugX and its implications

A new Remote Administration Tool has been discovered called PlugX which is a Remote Access Tool (RAT). It has also been named as Korplug. PlugX has been detected in targeted attacks not only against military, government or political organizations, but also against more or less ordinary companies. The attack starts with a phishing email containing a malicious attachment, usually an archived, bundled or specially crafted document that exploits either a vulnerability.

PlugX has been witnessed to be delivered with the three file components, namely:

• A legitimate file
• A malicious DLL that is loaded by the legitimate file
• A binary file that contains the malicious codes loaded by the DLL.