Computer Security

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Computer Security

• From Basics to Pro Hacker

By Jit Ray Chowdhury Roll 04 BCA 6th SEMESTER
Dinabandhu Andrews Institute of Technology and
Management Email ID-jit.ray.c_at_gmail.com Contact
No- 9831546599
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Your computer could be watching your every move!
Image Source - http//www.clubpmi.it/upload/serviz
i_marketing/images/spyware.jpg
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Introduction

• Basic protection for Dummies

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Virus!!

• They dont just attack you computer but actually
  first they attack you as mostly they need some
  user interaction to get your PC infected and for
  that they play with your mind and fool you to do
  so.

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Protecting against Virus.

• For protecting your PC from virus you not only
  need to have a updated antivirus and firewall
  installed but also be aware of the ways virus
  fools you.
• Example- like you commonly run external scripts
  send by virus on your scrapbook.

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Must Know About

• A program that monitors your actions. While they
  are sometimes like a remote control program used
  by a hacker, software companies to gather data
  about customers. The practice is generally
  frowned upon.

SPYWARE
Definition from BlackICE Internet Security
Systems - http//blackice.iss.net/glossary.php
An apparently useful and innocent program
containing additional hidden code which allows
the unauthorized collection, exploitation,
falsification, or destruction of data.
Definition from Texas State Library and
Archives Commission - http//www.tsl.state.tx.us/l
d/pubs/compsecurity/glossary.html
TROJAN HORSE
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Symptoms

• Targeted Pop-ups
• Slow Connection
• Targeted E-Mail (Spam)
• Unauthorized Access
• Spam Relaying
• System Crash
• Program Customisation

SPYWARE
SPYWARE / TROJAN
SPYWARE
TROJAN HORSE
TROJAN HORSE
SPYWARE / TROJAN
SPYWARE
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Spyware-Network Overview

• Push
• Advertising
• Pull
• Tracking
• Personal data

Image Source Image derived and produced by
Andrew Brown, Tim Cocks and Kumutha Swampillai,
February 2004.
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Virus, Worm, Trojan Horse, Spyware

• Virus cannot replicate themselves but worm and
  Trojan can do that.
• A virus cannot be spread without a human action
  such as running an infected file or program but
  worm and Trojan have the capabilities to spread
  themselves automatically from computer to
  computer through network connection.

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• A virus do not consume system memory but worm
  consumes too much system memory and network
  bandwidth.
• Trojans are used by malicious users to access
  your computer information but viruses and worms
  cant do so, they simply infect your computer.
• Spyware collect data from your computer without
  consent for Precision Marketing by various
  companies

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Hackers

• The Attitude to the Infinity

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What is Hacker?

• Its about technical adeptness , being delight in
  solving problems and overcoming limits.
• There is a community of expert programmers and
  networking wizards that traces its history back
  through decades to the first time-sharing
  minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet
  experiments. The members of this culture
  originated the term hacker. Hackers built the
  Internet. Hackers made the Unix operating system
  what it is today. Hackers make the World Wide Web
  work. If you are part of this culture, if you
  have contributed to it and other people in it
  know who you are and call you a hacker, you're a
  hacker.

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• The hacker mind-set is not confined to this
  software-hacker culture. There are people who
  apply the hacker attitude to other things, like
  electronics or music actually, you can find it
  at the highest levels of any science or art.
  Software hackers recognize these kindred spirits
  elsewhere and may call them hackers too and
  some claim that the hacker nature is really
  independent of the particular medium the hacker
  works in. But in the rest of this document we
  will focus on the skills and attitudes of
  software hackers, and the traditions of the
  shared culture that originated the term hacker.

Jit Ray Chowdhury
http//jit.ray.c_at_googlepages.coom
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• There is another group of people who loudly call
  themselves hackers, but aren't. These are people
  (mainly adolescent males) who get a kick out of
  breaking into computers and freaking the phone
  system. Real hackers call these people crackers
  and have nothing to do with them. Real hackers
  mostly think crackers are lazy, irresponsible,
  and not very bright, and object that being able
  to break security doesn't make you a hacker any
  more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an
  automotive engineer. Unfortunately, many
  journalists and writers have been fooled into
  using the word hacker to describe crackers
  this irritates real hackers no end.
• The basic difference is this hackers build
  things, crackers break them.

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The Hacker Attitude

• Dont learn to Hack, Hack to Learn.
• The world is full of fascinating problems waiting
  to be solved.
• No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
• Boredom and drudgery are evil.
• Attitude is no substitute for competence.

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Dont learn to Hack, Hack to Learn

• Hackers solve problems and build things, and
  they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual
  help.. You also have to develop a kind of faith
  in your own learning capacity a belief that
  even though you may not know all of what you need
  to solve a problem, if you tackle just a piece of
  it and learn from that, you'll learn enough to
  solve the next piece and so on, until you're
  done.

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The world is full of fascinating problems waiting
to be solved

• Being a hacker is lots of fun, but it's a kind
  of fun that takes lots of effort. The effort
  takes motivation. Successful athletes get their
  motivation from a kind of physical delight in
  making their bodies perform, in pushing their own
  physical limits. Similarly, to be a hacker you
  have to get a basic thrill from solving problems,
  sharpening your skills, and exercising your
  intelligence. If you aren't the kind of person
  that feels this way naturally, you'll need to
  become one in order to make it as a hacker.
  Otherwise you'll find your hacking energy is
  drained by distractions like money, and social
  approval.

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No problem should ever have to be solved twice.

• Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource.
  They shouldn't be wasted on re-inventing the
  wheel when there are so many fascinating new
  problems waiting out there
• To behave like a hacker, you have to believe that
  the thinking time of other hackers is precious
  so much so that it's almost a moral duty for you
  to share information, solve problems and then
  give the solutions away just so other hackers can
  solve new problems instead of having to
  perpetually re-address old ones

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Boredom and drudgery are evil.

• Hackers (and creative people in general) should
  never be bored or have to drudge at stupid
  repetitive work, because when this happens it
  means they aren't doing what only they can do
  solve new problems. This wastefulness hurts
  everybody. Therefore boredom and drudgery are not
  just unpleasant but actually evil .
• To behave like a hacker, you have to believe this
  enough to want to automate away the boring bits
  as much as possible, not just for yourself but
  for everybody else (especially other hackers).

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Attitude is no substitute for competence.

• To be a hacker, you have to develop some of these
  attitudes. But copying an attitude alone won't
  make you a hacker. Becoming a hacker will take
  intelligence, practice, dedication, and hard
  work.
• Therefore, you have to learn to distrust attitude
  and respect competence of every kind. Hackers
  won't let posers waste their time, but they
  worship competence.
• The hacker attitude is vital, but skills are even
  more vital. Attitude is no substitute for
  competence, and there's a certain basic toolkit
  of skills which you have to have before any
  hacker will dream of calling you one. This
  toolkit changes slowly over time as technology
  creates new skills and makes old ones obsolete.

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Basic Hacking Skills

• Learn how to program.
• Get one of the open-source Unixes and learn to
  use and run it.
• Learn how to use the World Wide Web and write
  HTML.
• If you don't have functional English, learn it.

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Class of Hackers

• Black hats
• Individuals with extraordinary computing skills,
  resorting to malicious or destructive activities.
  Also known as Crackers.
• Gray Hats
• Individuals who work both offensively and
  defensively at various times.
• White Hats
• Individuals professing hacker skills and using
  them for defensive purposes. Also known as
  Security Analysts.

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• Script Kiddies
• Person, normally not technologically
  sophisticated, who randomly seeks out a specific
  weakness over the internet to gain root access to
  a system without really understanding what he is
  exploiting because the weakness was discovered by
  someone else.
• Phreak
• Person who breaks into telecommunications
  systems.
• Ethical Hacker
• May be Independent or maybe group of
  consultants - Claims to be knowledgeable about
  black hat activities.

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Responsibility of Hackers

• Write open-source software
• Help test and debug open-source software
• Publish useful information
• Serve the hacker culture itself

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Disciplined Life of Hackers

• Again, to be a hacker, you have to enter the
  hacker mindset. There are some things you can do
  when you're not at a computer that seem to help.
  They're not substitutes for hacking (nothing is)
  but many hackers do them, and feel that they
  connect in some basic way with the essence of
  hacking.
• Read science fiction. Go to science fiction
  conventions (a good way to meet hackers and
  proto-hackers).
• Develop your appreciation of puns and wordplay

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• Train in a martial-arts form. The kind of mental
  discipline required for martial arts seems to be
  similar in important ways to what hackers do. The
  most popular forms among hackers are definitely
  Asian empty-hand arts such as Tae Kwon Do,
  various forms of Karate, Kung Fu, Aikido, or Ju
  Jitsu. The most hackerly martial arts are those
  which emphasize mental discipline, relaxed
  awareness, and control, rather than raw strength,
  athleticism, or physical toughness.
• Study an actual meditation discipline. The
  perennial favorite among hackers is Zen. Other
  styles may work as well, but be careful to choose
  one that doesn't require you to believe crazy
  things.
• Develop an analytical ear for music. Learn to
  appreciate peculiar kinds of music. Learn to play
  some musical instrument well, or how to sing.

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• The more of these things you already do, the more
  likely it is that you are natural hacker
  material. Why these things in particular is not
  completely clear, but they're connected with a
  mix of left- and right-brain skills that seems to
  be important hackers need to be able to both
  reason logically and step outside the apparent
  logic of a problem at a moment's notice.
• Work as intensely as you play and play as
  intensely as you work. For true hackers, the
  boundaries between "play", "work", "science" and
  "art" all tend to disappear, or to merge into a
  high-level creative playfulness. Also, don't be
  content with a narrow range of skills. Though
  most hackers self-describe as programmers, they
  are very likely to be more than competent in
  several related skills system administration,
  web design, and PC hardware troubleshooting are
  common ones. A hacker who's a system
  administrator, on the other hand, is likely to be
  quite skilled at script programming and web
  design. Hackers don't do things by halves if
  they invest in a skill at all, they tend to get
  very good at it.

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Hacking

• The Professionalism

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Why this knowledge is necessary?

• Internet has grown very fast and security has
  lagged behind.
• In 1988 a "worm program" written by a college
  student shut down about 10 percent of computers
  connected to the Internet. This was the
  beginning of the era of cyber attacks.
• In India there is a demand for about 80,000
  security professionals where as only 22,000 are
  available and security specialists markets are
  expanding unlike other technology professions.

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95 of Web Apps Have Vulnerabilities

• Cross-site scripting (80 percent)
• SQL injection (62 percent)
• Parameter tampering (60 percent)
• Cookie poisoning (37 percent)
• Database server (33 percent)
• Web server (23 percent)
• Buffer overflow (19 percent)

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Cross-site scripting
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SQL injection

• Unvalidated input SQL Injection example
• username admin
• password anything OR xx
• Original Query
• SELECT count() FROM userinfo WHERE
  name_at_username and pass_at_password
• Database will execute
• SELECT count() FROM userinfo WHERE nameadmin
  and passanything OR xx
• Got logged in successfully!

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Phases Involved in Ethical Hacking

• Footprinting
• Scanning
• Enumeration
• Gaining Access
• Escalating privilege
• Pilfering
• Covering tracks
• Creating back doors
• Denial of service

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Footprinting

• Objective
• Gathering Target Address range, namespace,
  acquisition and other information gathering
  essential for attack.
• Techniques
• Domain name lookup
• Whois
• Nslookup
• Sam Spade
• ARIN (American Registry of
• Internet Numbers)

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Scanning

• Objective
• Bulk target assessment and identification of
  listing services focuses the attackers attention
  on the most promising avenues of entry
• Techniques
• Ping sweep
• TCP/UDP port scan
• OS Detection

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Enumeration

• Objective
• More intrusive probing now begins as attackers
  begin identifying valid user accounts or poorly
  protected resource shares
• Techniques
• List user accounts
• List file shares
• Identify applications

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Gaining Access

• Objective
• Enough data has been gathered at this point to
  make an informed attempt to access the target
• Techniques
• Password eavesdropping
• File share brute forcing
• Password file grab
• Buffer overflows

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Pilfering

• Objective
• The information gathering process begins again
  to identify mechanisms to gain access to trusted
  systems
• Techniques
• Elevate trusts
• Search for clearnet passwords

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Covering Tracks

• Objective
• Once total ownership of the target is secured,
  hiding this fact from system administrators
  becomes paramount, lest they quickly end the romp
• Techniques
• Clear logs
• Hide tools

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Creating Back Doors

• Objective
• Trap doors will be laid in various parts of the
  system to ensure that privileged access is easily
  regained at the whim of the intruder
• Techniques
• Create rogue user accounts
• Schedule batch jobs
• Infect startup files
• Plant remote control services
• Install monitoring mechanisms
• Replace apps with Trojans

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Denial of Service

• Objective
• If an attacker is unsuccessful in gaining
  access, they may use readily available exploit
  code to disable a target as a last resort
• Techniques
• SYN flood
• ICMP techniques
• Identical SYN requests
• Overlapping fragment/offset bugs
• Out of bounds TCP options (OOB)
• DDoS

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Finally

• There is always more to learn like Evading IDS,
  Firewalls, Honey pots,Buffer Overflows,
  Cryptography, Sniffers and protective measures to
  be taken to defend against all these. But its
  time for me to leave you on your own and take up
  the responsibility and learn it up yourself if
  your are passionate enough to pursue all this.

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Thank You

• Questions??

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Bibliography / Links

• 0A Brief History of Hackerdom -
  http//catb.org/esr/writings/hacker-history/hacke
  r-history.html
• 1 "Spyware" Definition - BlackICE Internet
  Security Systems - http//blackice.iss.net/glossar
  y.php
• 2 "Trojan Horse" Definition
• Texas State Library and Archives Commission -
  http//www.tsl.state.tx.us/ld/pubs/compsecurity/gl
  ossary.html
• 3 Zeinalipour-Yazti, D. Exploiting the
  Security Weaknesses of the Gnutella Protocol,
  University of California. 
• 4 Joshi, R. Network Security Applications,
  Merchantile Communications, CANIT Conference
  2003.
• 5 CERT Advisory CA-1999-02 http//www.cert.org/
  advisories/CA-1999-02.html
• 6 Spyware Guide http//www.spyware-guide.com
• 7 Trojan Horses - http//www.mpsmits.com/highlig
  hts/trojan_horses.shtml
• 8 Trojan Horse - Back Orifice -
  http//www.nwinternet.com/pchelp/bo/bo.html
• 9 NetBus - http//www.nwinternet.com/pchelp/nb/
  netbus.htm
• 10 BBC News - http//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technol
  ogy/3153229.stm
• 11 Wired News Judge takes bite out of Gator
  www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,53875,00.html
• 12 Tracking Cookies Demonstration at
  http//www.irt.org/instant/chapter10/tracker/index
  4.htm
• 13 BonziBuddy - http//www.bonzi.com/bonzibuddy/
  bonzibuddyfreehom.asp
• 14 Unwanted Links (Spyware)
  http//www.unwantedlinks.com
• 15 Andersen, R. "Security Engineering", First
  Edition, J. Wiley and Sons, 2001.
• 16 Scacchi, W. Privacy and Other Social
  Issues, Addison-Wesley, 2003.
• http//www.ics.uci.edu/wscacchi/Tech-EC/Security
  Privacy/Privacy.ppt