Tag Archive for: step

‘Ethical’ hacker tries to stay a step ahead of the bad guys


The internet is a tough neighborhood and Nikolas Behar is a hacker. He’s among the many who show up every year at DEFCON in Las Vegas, the hacker convention. But Niko, as everyone calls him, insists he’s on the right side of the firewall.

He considers himself an ethical hacker, and he works for groups that need protection from criminal hackers trying to break into their vaults of valued passwords and data.

“A lot of people, when they think about hackers, they think about people in hoodies,” Behar said. “But there’s a movement in the industry that’s trying to change that narrative and show that hackers aren’t necessarily bad.”

As an ethical hacker, Behar has to think like a criminal. When he works for a client, he tries to break into their system to spot vulnerabilities. One example, he was able to hack into the system of a hospital client.

“So what I was able to do was park across the street in my rental car with a special antenna. And I was able to connect to their Wi-Fi and communicate with a heart monitor on their network from across the street,” he said. “All because they didn’t configure their Wi-Fi correctly and it was leaking outside the building.”

Another time when he was working for a hedge fund, he got into their building after hours and jumped over a cubicle wall to find two unlocked computers.

“So we demonstrated that we would have been able to make a $5 million trade without anybody really noticing because there’s a cubicle that’s supposed to be secure and the wall of the cubicle doesn’t go all the way to the ceiling. And the stuff in the cubicle is not locked or encrypted.”

So, who exactly are the unethical hackers? Sometimes, they work for national governments that want to pose a security threat to the U.S. Sometimes, they’re just looking for money, and that’s why they target people like us and your personal information.

“First name. Last name. Social security. Date of birth. And then you take all that data and you can sell in bulk to the highest bidder,” said Christian Dehoyos, a cybersecurity architect who leads San Diego’s chapter of the group the Open Worldwide Application Security…

Source…

Chinese police step up fight against hackers, with thousands captured


Chinese police have intensified the fight against hacker crimes over the past year, leading to the capture of more than 7,000 suspects, the Ministry of Public Security said on Thursday.

Police officers across the country have solved 2,430 criminal cases involving hackers since the start of last year, which has contributed to protecting data security and maintaining order in cyberspace, Li Tong, deputy head of the ministry”s cybersecurity bureau, told a news conference.

Hacker crimes mainly include illegal intrusion into computer information systems, illegal acquisition of computer information system data, illegal control of computer systems and the provision of programs and tools for intrusion.

Statistics released by the ministry on Thursday showed that the number of hacking cases solved by Chinese police has risen three consecutive years, with an average annual growth rate of 27.7 percent.

While directly infiltrating and sabotaging computer information systems, criminals have also been discovered to have provided technical support and material information for other illegal activities such as telecom fraud, online gambling and online pornography, Shi You, a bureau official, said.

He said the methods used by hacking criminals have diversified with the rapid development of technologies, including artificial intelligence and blockchain, adding that thousands of hacker tools are circulating online.

“Most of the tools come with detailed tutorials and user-friendly interfaces, allowing people to carry out criminal activities such as vulnerability scanning and Trojan implantation without needing to have a high level of technical expertise,” Shi said.

The average age of hackers had also been decreasing year by year, he added, revealing that there have been cases of elementary school students being proficient in using hacker tools.

Huang Xiaosu, another bureau official who specializes in technologies, said the victims of such crimes frequently have computer systems with security loopholes or have failed to install risk prevention software.

“Some victims had little security awareness, as they used simple passwords that were easy for hackers to attack,” she added.

To…

Source…

Presence Sensor Locks Computer When You Step Away


Having a computer that locks its screen after a few minutes of inactivity is always a good idea from a security standpoint, especially in offices where there is a lot of foot traffic. Even the five- or ten-minute activity timers that are set on most workstations aren’t really perfect solutions. While ideally in these situations we’d all be locking our screens manually when we get up, that doesn’t always happen. The only way to guarantee that this problem is solved is to use something like this automatic workstation locker.

The project is based around the LD2410 presence sensor, which is itself a small 24 GHz radar module paired with an ESP32 which simplifies the detection of objects and motion. [Enzo] paired one of these modules with a Seed Xiao nrf52840 development board to listen to the radar module and send the screen lock keyboard shortcut to the computer when it detects that the user has walked away from the machine. The only thing that [Enzo] wants to add is a blinking LED to let the user know when the device is about to timeout so that it doesn’t accidentally lock the machine when not needed.

One of the parts of this build that is a little bit glossed over is the fact that plenty of microcontroller platforms can send keystrokes to a computer even if they’re not themselves a USB keyboard. Even the Arduino Uno can do this, so by now this feature is fairly platform-agnostic. Still, you can use this to your advantage if you have the opposite problem from [Enzo] and need your computer to stay logged in no matter what.


Source…

Staying a step ahead of the computer hackers | News, Sports, Jobs