Social Engineering

Social engineering is a term that describes a non-technical kind of intrusion that relies heavily on human interaction and often involves tricking other people to break normal security procedures.

Social engineering is the art of manipulating people so they give up confidential information. The types of information these criminals are seeking can vary, but when individuals are targeted the criminals are usually trying to trick you into giving them your passwords or bank information, or access your computer to secretly install malicious software that will give them access to your passwords and bank information as well as giving them control over your computer.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles”

                                                                                                                                           Sun Tzu.

Criminals use social engineering tactics because it is usually easier to exploit your natural inclination to trust than it is to discover ways to hack your software.  For example, it is much easier to fool someone into giving you their password than it is for you to try hacking their password (unless the password is really weak).

 

Common social engineering attack

Email from a friend.
These messages may use your trust and curiosity:

* Contain a link
* Contain a download

These messages usually have a scenario or story:

The message may explain there is a problem that requires you to verify of information by clicking on. The message may notify you that
* You are a winner
* May ask for help.
* Creating a hostile situation
* Get a Job There

The threat of social engineering is real 

* 97% of security professionals and 86% of all IT professionals are aware or highly aware of this potential security threat 
* 43% know they have been targeted by social engineering schemes

* Only 16% were confident they had not been targeted by social engineering, while 41% were not aware if they had been attacked or not
Financial gains are the primary motivation of social engineering

* 51% of social engineering attacks are motivated by financial gain

* 14% of social engineering attacks are motivated by revenge
Social engineering attacks are costly especially in large organizations

* 48% of large companies and 32% of companies of all sizes have experienced 25 or more social engineering attacks in the past two years

* 48% of all participants cite an average per incident cost of over $25,000

* 30% of large companies cite a per incident cost of over $100,000
New employees are most susceptible to social engineering techniques

* New employees (60%), contractors (44%), and executive assistants (38%) are cited to be at high risk for social engineering techniques.
Lack of proactive training to prevent social engineering attacks

* Only 26% of respondents do ongoing training 34% do not currently make any attempt to educate employees, although 19% have plans to.

Prevention

Slow down. Spammers want you to act first and think later. If the message conveys a sense of urgency, or uses high-pressure sales tactics be skeptical; never let their urgency influence your careful review.

Research the facts. Be suspicious of any unsolicited messages. If the email looks like it is from a company you use, do your own research. Use a search engine to go to the real company’s site, or a phone directory to find their phone number.

Delete any request for financial information or passwords. If you get asked to reply to a message with personal information, it’s a scam.

Reject requests for help or offers of help. Legitimate companies and organizations do not contact you to provide help. If you did not specifically request assistance from the sender, consider any offer to ’help’ restore credit scores, refinance a home, answer your question, etc., a scam. Similarly, if you receive a request for help from a charity or organization that you do not have a relationship with, delete it. To give, seek out reputable charitable organizations on your own to avoid falling for a scam.

Don’t let a link in control of where you land. Stay in control by finding the website yourself using a search engine to be sure you land where you intend to land. Hovering over links in email will show the actual URL at the bottom, but a good fake can still steer you wrong.

Email hijacking is rampant. Hackers, spammers, and social engineers taking over control of people’s email accounts (and other communication accounts) have become rampant. Once they control someone’s email account they prey on the trust of all the person’s contacts. Even when the sender appears to be someone you know, if you aren’t expecting an email with a link or attachment check with your friend before opening links or downloading.

Beware of any download. If you don’t know the sender personally AND expect a file from them, downloading anything is a mistake.

Foreign offers are fakes. If you receive email from a foreign lottery or sweepstakes, money from an unknown relative, or requests to transfer funds from a foreign country for a share of the money it is guaranteed to be a scam.

Set your spam filters to high. Every email program has spam filters. To find yours, look under your settings options, and set these high–just remember to check your spam folder periodically to see if legitimate email has been accidentally trapped there. You can also search for a step-by-step guide to setting your spam filters by searching on the name of your email provider plus the phrase ’spam filters’.

Secure your computing devices. Install anti-virus software, firewalls, email filters and keep these up-to-date. Set your operating system to automatically update, and if your smartphone doesn’t automatically update, manually update it whenever you receive a notice to do so. Use an anti-phishing tool offered by your web browser or third party to alert you to risks.

Solid State Drive :-

A solid-state drive (SSD) (also known as a solid-state disk or electronic disk, though it contains no actual "disk" of any kind, nor motors to "drive" the disks) is a data storage device using integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently. SSD technology uses electronic interfaces compatible with traditional block input/output (I/O) hard disk drives.

Intel Solid State Drive (SSD)

Solid state drive 320series (SSD):-

Laptops are quickly being eclipsed by tablets which have NAND flash drive embedded on their motherboard. Operating systems like windows 7 have been optimized to take advantage of SSD input and output performance.

This product is manufacture by Intel. Solid state drive is much more reliable and fast for booting as for the normal hard drive. It shifts the pc form performance form high gear. It improves reliability, performance, and much more.  Its reading performance is up to 270mb per seconds. It also has 128bit encryption capacity to secure your data. This drive is connected with the help of SATA cable. And compatible whit minimum 1.5Gb/s.

Solid State Drive 320series

Capacity:-

Solid state drives 320series have the capacity up to 40 to 600GB.

Temperature:-

This drive has the temperature up to 70 degree centigrade.

Reading and writing latency:-

It has the reading latency of 75 µs. and has the writing latency of 90 µs. but it fluctuate on the size of drive.

Inch factor:-

Normal SATA hard drive is of 3.5inch and the SSD are of 2.5inch. SSD are smaller than the SATA normal hard drive.

Voltage Characterstics:-

It need min 4.75v and max 5.25v to run.

Different Between Solid-state drive and Hard disk drive:-

Hard Drive Drive VS Solid State Drive

Start up Time:-

Solid starte drive Almost instantaneous no mechanical components to prepare. May need a few milliseconds to come out of an automatic power-saving mode.

Hard disk drive spin-up may take several seconds. A system with many drives may need to stagger spin-up to limit peak power drawn, which is briefly high when an HDD is first started.

Random access Time:-

Solid state drive Typically under 100 µs. As data can be retrieved directly from various locations of the flash memory, access time is usually not a big performance bottleneck.

Hard disk drive Ranges from 2.9 (high end server drive) to 12 ms (laptop HDD) due to the need to move the heads and wait for the data to rotate under the read/write head.

Data transfer rate:-

SSD technology can deliver rather consistent read/write speed, but when lots of individual smaller blocks are accessed, performance is reduced. In consumer products the maximum transfer rate typically ranges from about 100 MB/s to 600 MB/s, depending on the disk.

In Hard disk drive Once the head is positioned, when reading or writing a continuous track, an enterprise HDD can transfer data at about 140 MB/s. In practice transfer speeds are many times lower due to constant seeking, as files are read from various locations or they are fragmented. Data transfer rate depends also upon rotational speed, which can range from 4,200 to 15,000 rpm.

Noise:-

SSDs have no moving parts and therefore are basically silent, although electric noise from the circuits may occur.

HDDs have moving parts (heads, actuator, and spindle motor) and make characteristic sounds of whirring and clicking; noise levels vary between models, but can be significant. Laptop hard disks are relatively quiet.

6000+ Indian Sites Hacked By Pakistani Hacker : Cyber War

As India and Pakistan are celebrating there Independence day peacefully, but on the other hand Cyber Hackers are celebrating there Independence Day in there own style.
Hackers are hacking the website and defacing its index page with the message as "Happy Independence Day".

As last time also Pakistani and Indian hackers are hacking the other sites and celebrating Independence. Same as this year also, Pakistani hacker have hacked the mass number of sites and rooted the whole server. There are more then 6 thousand site hacked by the Pakistani hacker and other are also still hacking. Some of them have hacked government server of India and defaced the site.
On the other hand till now we have not received any kind of mass cyber attack by the Indian hacker, rather Afghan Cyber Army have hacked mass number of sites of Pakistan including government site, some high profiled sites also.

A hacker with online name as "Pakistan Shaheen" have rooted the Indian server and defaced over 6 thousand of the site. List of the site hacked can be seen here on Pastebin. On the deface page
hackers have posted with the Pakistan Flag and Patriotic song in the background.

This cyber war continuing from last 2 days, and it is continuously damaging Indian Cyber Space...

Indian IT expert and ethical hacker Vivek Gurung writes in his personal blog of the 'cyber war' between Pakistan and India during this past independence day.

Check if your computer is MALE or FEMALE
1) Open notepad
2) Copy the code below:

Code:
CreateObject("SAPI.SpVoice").Speak"I Love You"

3) Paste it in notepad
4) Save it as syedbilaltasneem.vbs
5) After you have saved it, open madleets.vbs
6) You computer will tell you (I Love You) in a male voice or a female voice.

Comment if your computer is a male or a female

Cool Graffiti HD wallpapers hope you guys like it....