Indian Hackers Facts | Real Truth Revealed ?

There has been a lot of commotion in the Indian Hacking scene lately, and 

 I expressed some pretty strong views regarding that.

  When it comes to hacking, every other guy tends to tape the "hacker" word with his name/codename without even realizing its significance. Then there is Facebook ...Have a look at it -

Seriously guys..what were they thinking ?! I am still counting the number of “Indian Cyber Army” India has and the number of groups tend to increase recycling all the content, same VIP forums, same deface techniques, zero original research. Then there is Ankit Fadiya...dont let me even get started

In the end tired of all the bullshit around, I decided to cover an article on the REAL INDIAN HACKERS (or Hackers of Indian Origin), folks who are actually dedicated to security and are hackers in real sense. Lets start, shall we ?

Also have a look @ Website Defacement Proves You are Impotent

& also @ Ethical Hacker Ankit Fadia Hacking Seminar Truth Reveled: Pure waste of Time
Pranav Mistry

The famed 6th sense developer,Pranav Mistry is a research assistant and a PhD candidate at MIT Media Lab. SixthSense has recently attracted global attention. Among some of his previous work, Pranav has invented Mouseless - an invisible computer mouse; intelligent sticky notes that can be searched, located and can send reminders and messages; a pen that can draw in 3D; and a public map that can act as Google of physical world. Pranav has commercialized his invention, the sixth sense and SixthSense is now being actively used at NASA.

It is rumored that Facebook tried to acquire the technology from Pranav for a reportedly $2 billion and 5% ownership of Facebook, but Pranav decided to open source it instead.

Thats what any real hacker do. Hats Off to him.

Here you can read more about him at Amarjit’s Blog

Koushik Dutta or “Koush”

“Set Your Phone Free..”

Rings a bell ? Koushik Dutta or “Koush” is responsible for Clockworkmod recovery and Rom Manager for Android rooting and the core member of famed UnrEVOked team. He has been a .net developer from heart and had his internship initially at Microsoft and is a former MVP. He decided to leave Microsoft and hack Android cellphones like there was no tomorrow. Sony approached him after geohot humped them like anything but he politely declined .

Bravo for his efforts, we are able to root painlessly using UnREVOked.
Now only if UnrEVOked can release UnrEVOked 3.33 soon :)

Vivek Ramchandran

Vivek Ramachandran has been working in the computer and network security domain, in some form or the other, for the past 7 years and has worked with Industry giants like Reliance, Cisco, Microsoft. He was among the Top 10 Indian finalists in the Microsoft shootout competition among the list of 65000 participants. Then he decided to join Airtight Networks and there discovered Caffe Latte attack attack along with his colleague MD Sohail Ahmad from Airtight Networks ,the wifi hacking technique that doesn't required you to be in active vicinity of the wifi zone.

That said, he is one of the researcher to lookout.

Almost everybody at NULL Security Community & Garage4hackers

I said it before and I will say it again, the Only active Indian hacking community is NULL community, and the best Indian Hacking Forum where real hackers meet is garage4hackers.com hands on.

Shoutz to garage crew :)

Folks at Indian Honeynet Chapter

Now we are talking..Indian Honeynet chapter is the collaborative effort of the best geeks and hackers .The focus of honeypot is on Worms and Botnets and developing an Open Source tool to study and counter brute force attacks/ phishing through wifi. Its also being setup as potential web-app honeypot,and aims on improving detection and forensic techniques. Heading the ship are L Shriram, K K Mookhey, Amit Chugh, Asim Jakhar and a lot of professionals who are dedicated in the field of computer security.

Hari Prasad

The famed security researcher Hari Prasad is the winner of EFF Pioneer award, as he along with Alex Halderman, and Rop Gonggrijp were able to study an electronic voting machine (EVM) and found significant vulnerabilities that would not be difficult to execute. For his troubles, Prasad was arrested and jailed in August, held without bail in Mumbai for a week. Though he is now out on bail and in the United States, he still faces criminal prosecution for alleged theft of the EVM and other charges.

The genius of the Indian system is that instead of making machines tamper proof and more efficient, they arrested him.

According to the Indian news agency PTI, the magistrate who released Prasad on bail noted that "no offence was disclosed with Hari Prasad's arrest and even if it was assumed that [the electronic voting machine] was stolen it appears that there was no dishonest intention on his part...he was trying to show how [electronic voting] machines can be tampered with."

Jayant Krishnamurthy

Jayant Krishnamurthy is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, CMU and his interests include are machine learning, machine reading, common sense reasoning, information extraction, knowledge representation, and their applications in AI and NLP (shamelessly taken from his website). He is one of the researchers who are behind designing MD6 algorithm (yeah you heard it right, the evolution of MD5). He is a top level computer theorist and researcher and is a real life hacker. He teaches computer and network security and you must ahve a look at the problems and solutions at the given link.

For the lighter side,you can have a look at the funny flash movie based on his real life experiences at high school.

I guess, you now have an actual idea of the Indian hackers now :) These guys are real and are deemed worthy of having the hacker emblem with them.

Indian Hackers Facts | Real Truth Revealed ?

There has been a lot of commotion in the Indian Hacking scene lately, and 

 I expressed some pretty strong views regarding that.

  When it comes to hacking, every other guy tends to tape the "hacker" word with his name/codename without even realizing its significance. Then there is Facebook ...Have a look at it -

Seriously guys..what were they thinking ?! I am still counting the number of “Indian Cyber Army” India has and the number of groups tend to increase recycling all the content, same VIP forums, same deface techniques, zero original research. Then there is Ankit Fadiya...dont let me even get started

In the end tired of all the bullshit around, I decided to cover an article on the REAL INDIAN HACKERS (or Hackers of Indian Origin), folks who are actually dedicated to security and are hackers in real sense. Lets start, shall we ?

Also have a look @ Website Defacement Proves You are Impotent

& also @ Ethical Hacker Ankit Fadia Hacking Seminar Truth Reveled: Pure waste of Time
Pranav Mistry

The famed 6th sense developer,Pranav Mistry is a research assistant and a PhD candidate at MIT Media Lab. SixthSense has recently attracted global attention. Among some of his previous work, Pranav has invented Mouseless - an invisible computer mouse; intelligent sticky notes that can be searched, located and can send reminders and messages; a pen that can draw in 3D; and a public map that can act as Google of physical world. Pranav has commercialized his invention, the sixth sense and SixthSense is now being actively used at NASA.

It is rumored that Facebook tried to acquire the technology from Pranav for a reportedly $2 billion and 5% ownership of Facebook, but Pranav decided to open source it instead.

Thats what any real hacker do. Hats Off to him.

Here you can read more about him at Amarjit’s Blog

Koushik Dutta or “Koush”

“Set Your Phone Free..”

Rings a bell ? Koushik Dutta or “Koush” is responsible for Clockworkmod recovery and Rom Manager for Android rooting and the core member of famed UnrEVOked team. He has been a .net developer from heart and had his internship initially at Microsoft and is a former MVP. He decided to leave Microsoft and hack Android cellphones like there was no tomorrow. Sony approached him after geohot humped them like anything but he politely declined .

Bravo for his efforts, we are able to root painlessly using UnREVOked.
Now only if UnrEVOked can release UnrEVOked 3.33 soon :)

Vivek Ramchandran

Vivek Ramachandran has been working in the computer and network security domain, in some form or the other, for the past 7 years and has worked with Industry giants like Reliance, Cisco, Microsoft. He was among the Top 10 Indian finalists in the Microsoft shootout competition among the list of 65000 participants. Then he decided to join Airtight Networks and there discovered Caffe Latte attack attack along with his colleague MD Sohail Ahmad from Airtight Networks ,the wifi hacking technique that doesn't required you to be in active vicinity of the wifi zone.

That said, he is one of the researcher to lookout.

Almost everybody at NULL Security Community & Garage4hackers

I said it before and I will say it again, the Only active Indian hacking community is NULL community, and the best Indian Hacking Forum where real hackers meet is garage4hackers.com hands on.

Shoutz to garage crew :)

Folks at Indian Honeynet Chapter

Now we are talking..Indian Honeynet chapter is the collaborative effort of the best geeks and hackers .The focus of honeypot is on Worms and Botnets and developing an Open Source tool to study and counter brute force attacks/ phishing through wifi. Its also being setup as potential web-app honeypot,and aims on improving detection and forensic techniques. Heading the ship are L Shriram, K K Mookhey, Amit Chugh, Asim Jakhar and a lot of professionals who are dedicated in the field of computer security.

Hari Prasad

The famed security researcher Hari Prasad is the winner of EFF Pioneer award, as he along with Alex Halderman, and Rop Gonggrijp were able to study an electronic voting machine (EVM) and found significant vulnerabilities that would not be difficult to execute. For his troubles, Prasad was arrested and jailed in August, held without bail in Mumbai for a week. Though he is now out on bail and in the United States, he still faces criminal prosecution for alleged theft of the EVM and other charges.

The genius of the Indian system is that instead of making machines tamper proof and more efficient, they arrested him.

According to the Indian news agency PTI, the magistrate who released Prasad on bail noted that "no offence was disclosed with Hari Prasad's arrest and even if it was assumed that [the electronic voting machine] was stolen it appears that there was no dishonest intention on his part...he was trying to show how [electronic voting] machines can be tampered with."

Jayant Krishnamurthy

Jayant Krishnamurthy is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science, CMU and his interests include are machine learning, machine reading, common sense reasoning, information extraction, knowledge representation, and their applications in AI and NLP (shamelessly taken from his website). He is one of the researchers who are behind designing MD6 algorithm (yeah you heard it right, the evolution of MD5). He is a top level computer theorist and researcher and is a real life hacker. He teaches computer and network security and you must ahve a look at the problems and solutions at the given link.

For the lighter side,you can have a look at the funny flash movie based on his real life experiences at high school.

I guess, you now have an actual idea of the Indian hackers now :) These guys are real and are deemed worthy of having the hacker emblem with them.

What would happen if the Internet collapsed ?

A global collapse of the Internet would have circumstances
far greater than driving your local IT professional nuts.

The Internet is robust. It's not dependent upon a single machine or cable. It's a network made up of other computer networks. It spans the globe. Connections cross over continents, under oceans and through space via satellites. And as the Internet has grown, so has our dependence upon it.

Connections across the Internet are flexible. When you use your computer to contact another machine on the Internet, the data could cross one of millions of pathways. Whenever you download a file, the file comes to your machine in electronic data packets that travel across the Internet. The packets don't all take the same path -- the traffic routes are dynamic. If a particular connection is damaged or unresponsive, the data can follow a different path to reach your machine.
Related Topics

This makes the Internet a reliable communications resource. Even if an entire section of the Internet were to go offline in the wake of a natural disaster or a nuclear attack, other sections could remain functional. While any data stored on machines that were hit by the disaster might be lost, the Internet itself would remain.

It's almost impossible to imagine a set of circumstances that could cause the Internet to collapse. It would require destruction on such a widespread scale that the loss of the Internet would probably be the least of our worries. But what if the Internet did collapse? How would that affect us? Would life change drastically or would we quickly adjust, relying on older means of communication?

Internet Collapse and Communication Errors

A world without the Internet would probably seem very strange to us now. Depending upon the nature of the disaster and how you defined the Internet, even basic services like text messaging or cell phone service could become unavailable. That's because the infrastructure for these services is also part of the Internet infrastructure. If you take this thought experiment to an extreme case, even the phone lines might not work since they, too, form part of the Internet's infrastructure.

Some cable and satellite services would be unavailable. You could still access television programming sent via broadcast towers if you had an antenna. But if the cable and satellite systems were part of the general collapse, you'd lose access to most channels.

You wouldn't be able to log on to social networking sites and services like Facebook or Twitter. You wouldn't be able to fire up an instant messaging service to check up on friends. Many of the tools we rely on to keep up with what our friends and family are doing would cease to exist. If the cell phone towers and telephone lines were also affected, we'd be reduced to writing letters and sending them through the post office.

Transferring files between computers would be difficult, too. You'd either need to store the files on some form of physical media like a compact disc or you'd need to connect the two computers with a physical cable. Projects that depend upon grid computing to make complex calculations wouldn't work either. Cloud computing services would also fail and the information you store on those services could become inaccessible.

The Economic Fallout of a Collapsed Internet

If the Internet did collapse somehow, the economic impact would be disastrous. While the loss of services like electronic banking or PayPal would be annoying, the effects would extend much further.

Think of the businesses that depend upon the Internet. Every Web site would be offline. Huge companies like Google or Amazon would become obsolete instantly. Other companies like Microsoft would see enormous sections of their operations disappear. Even companies that only use the Web as a means of advertisement would be adversely affected.

Assuming the collapse was either of a permanent or extended nature, many companies would go out of business. Hundreds of thousands of people would be out of a job. Google employs nearly 20,000 people alone [source: Google]. With hundreds of companies folding or cutting back on staff, the market would be flooded with people in need of a job.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, e-commerce accounted for 35 percent of all shipments from the manufacturing industry in 2007. That amounts to more than $1.8 trillion for that industry alone. When you extrapolate those numbers to all industries across the entire world, you'll see that commerce on the Internet is big business. If the Internet collapsed, multiple industries would experience an instant recession. There's no easy way to bounce back from a loss of trillions of dollars.

Some countries would feel the sting more than others. Developed countries would face severe economic crises as entire industry sectors either disappeared or struggled to survive in the wake of devastating losses. Other countries wouldn't suffer as many direct effects from the collapse because they don't have much of a presence on the Internet. But these countries would also suffer as the trade and aid they depend upon from other connected countries decreases.

Very few types of businesses would remain unaffected by the collapse of the Internet. The Internet has become pervasive in business.

Political Crises After the Internet Collapse

The economic fallout would probably be the primary crisis governments would face around the world if the Internet were to collapse. But that would just be one problem world leaders would face.

In the United States, there's a push to develop the power grids around the nation into a smart grid. Smart grids could theoretically respond to customer needs more efficiently, conserve power and communicate with one another over Internet connections. In theory, this system could reduce power outages and other problems. But if the Internet were to collapse, a smart grid would be crippled. Massive power outages could become a problem across any country using such a system.

As the Internet has become more pervasive, countries have used it to gather intelligence and to spy on one another. The loss of the Internet would be an enormous blow to intelligence agencies. Sharing information would become slow and difficult. Some governments might react to such a situation rashly. It's impossible to predict how each government would react; however, it's not hard to imagine a series of events that could escalate into a conflict.

Assuming world leaders could maintain order and resist the urge to blow each other up, other problems would surface. The Internet has become an important part of many educational programs. The loss of the Internet would leave a void that other resources would need to fill. Resources cost money -- something that would be in short supply as markets around the world try to recover from staggering losses.

In the United States, military organizations and some research institutions are part of networks that are similar to the Internet but are technically not part of the Internet itself. If these networks remained unaffected, at least some electronic communication and data transmission would be possible. But if our imaginary crisis extended all the way to these computer networks, the country would become vulnerable to all sorts of attacks.

What would happen if the Internet collapsed ?

A global collapse of the Internet would have circumstances
far greater than driving your local IT professional nuts.

The Internet is robust. It's not dependent upon a single machine or cable. It's a network made up of other computer networks. It spans the globe. Connections cross over continents, under oceans and through space via satellites. And as the Internet has grown, so has our dependence upon it.

Connections across the Internet are flexible. When you use your computer to contact another machine on the Internet, the data could cross one of millions of pathways. Whenever you download a file, the file comes to your machine in electronic data packets that travel across the Internet. The packets don't all take the same path -- the traffic routes are dynamic. If a particular connection is damaged or unresponsive, the data can follow a different path to reach your machine.
Related Topics

This makes the Internet a reliable communications resource. Even if an entire section of the Internet were to go offline in the wake of a natural disaster or a nuclear attack, other sections could remain functional. While any data stored on machines that were hit by the disaster might be lost, the Internet itself would remain.

It's almost impossible to imagine a set of circumstances that could cause the Internet to collapse. It would require destruction on such a widespread scale that the loss of the Internet would probably be the least of our worries. But what if the Internet did collapse? How would that affect us? Would life change drastically or would we quickly adjust, relying on older means of communication?

Internet Collapse and Communication Errors

A world without the Internet would probably seem very strange to us now. Depending upon the nature of the disaster and how you defined the Internet, even basic services like text messaging or cell phone service could become unavailable. That's because the infrastructure for these services is also part of the Internet infrastructure. If you take this thought experiment to an extreme case, even the phone lines might not work since they, too, form part of the Internet's infrastructure.

Some cable and satellite services would be unavailable. You could still access television programming sent via broadcast towers if you had an antenna. But if the cable and satellite systems were part of the general collapse, you'd lose access to most channels.

You wouldn't be able to log on to social networking sites and services like Facebook or Twitter. You wouldn't be able to fire up an instant messaging service to check up on friends. Many of the tools we rely on to keep up with what our friends and family are doing would cease to exist. If the cell phone towers and telephone lines were also affected, we'd be reduced to writing letters and sending them through the post office.

Transferring files between computers would be difficult, too. You'd either need to store the files on some form of physical media like a compact disc or you'd need to connect the two computers with a physical cable. Projects that depend upon grid computing to make complex calculations wouldn't work either. Cloud computing services would also fail and the information you store on those services could become inaccessible.

The Economic Fallout of a Collapsed Internet

If the Internet did collapse somehow, the economic impact would be disastrous. While the loss of services like electronic banking or PayPal would be annoying, the effects would extend much further.

Think of the businesses that depend upon the Internet. Every Web site would be offline. Huge companies like Google or Amazon would become obsolete instantly. Other companies like Microsoft would see enormous sections of their operations disappear. Even companies that only use the Web as a means of advertisement would be adversely affected.

Assuming the collapse was either of a permanent or extended nature, many companies would go out of business. Hundreds of thousands of people would be out of a job. Google employs nearly 20,000 people alone [source: Google]. With hundreds of companies folding or cutting back on staff, the market would be flooded with people in need of a job.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, e-commerce accounted for 35 percent of all shipments from the manufacturing industry in 2007. That amounts to more than $1.8 trillion for that industry alone. When you extrapolate those numbers to all industries across the entire world, you'll see that commerce on the Internet is big business. If the Internet collapsed, multiple industries would experience an instant recession. There's no easy way to bounce back from a loss of trillions of dollars.

Some countries would feel the sting more than others. Developed countries would face severe economic crises as entire industry sectors either disappeared or struggled to survive in the wake of devastating losses. Other countries wouldn't suffer as many direct effects from the collapse because they don't have much of a presence on the Internet. But these countries would also suffer as the trade and aid they depend upon from other connected countries decreases.

Very few types of businesses would remain unaffected by the collapse of the Internet. The Internet has become pervasive in business.

Political Crises After the Internet Collapse

The economic fallout would probably be the primary crisis governments would face around the world if the Internet were to collapse. But that would just be one problem world leaders would face.

In the United States, there's a push to develop the power grids around the nation into a smart grid. Smart grids could theoretically respond to customer needs more efficiently, conserve power and communicate with one another over Internet connections. In theory, this system could reduce power outages and other problems. But if the Internet were to collapse, a smart grid would be crippled. Massive power outages could become a problem across any country using such a system.

As the Internet has become more pervasive, countries have used it to gather intelligence and to spy on one another. The loss of the Internet would be an enormous blow to intelligence agencies. Sharing information would become slow and difficult. Some governments might react to such a situation rashly. It's impossible to predict how each government would react; however, it's not hard to imagine a series of events that could escalate into a conflict.

Assuming world leaders could maintain order and resist the urge to blow each other up, other problems would surface. The Internet has become an important part of many educational programs. The loss of the Internet would leave a void that other resources would need to fill. Resources cost money -- something that would be in short supply as markets around the world try to recover from staggering losses.

In the United States, military organizations and some research institutions are part of networks that are similar to the Internet but are technically not part of the Internet itself. If these networks remained unaffected, at least some electronic communication and data transmission would be possible. But if our imaginary crisis extended all the way to these computer networks, the country would become vulnerable to all sorts of attacks.

Anna hazare Bullshit on Anti-Corruption ??

Anna Hazare Bullshit on Anti-Corruption ??
If the Jan Lok Pal presides over the same system that has has corrupted civil servants, politicians, anti-corruption watchdogs, judges, media, civil society groups and ordinary citizens, why should we expect that the ombudsman will be incorruptible? Because the person is handpicked by unelected, unaccountable ‘civil society’ members? Those who propose that Nobel laureates (of Indian origin, not even of Indian citizenship) and Ramon Magsaysay Award winners should be among those who pick the Great Ombudsman of India—who is both policeman and judge—insult the hundreds of millions of ordinary Indian voters who regularly exercise their right to franchise. For they are demanding that the Scandinavian grandees in the Nobel Committee and the Filipino members of the Magsaysay foundation should have an indirect role in selecting an all-powerful Indian official. [See this post at Reality Check India]
The argument that people should be involved in drafting legislation is fine, even if it misses the point that the government is not a foreign entity but a representative of the people. It is entirely other thing to demand that the legislation drafted by an self-appointed, unaccountable and unrepresentative set of people be passed at the threat of blackmail. If we must have representatives of the people involved in lawmaking, we are better off if they are the elected ones, however flawed, as opposed to self-appointed ones, whatever prizes the latter might have won.

The Jan Lok Pal will become another logjammed, politicised and ultimately corrupt institution, for the passionate masses who demand new institutions have a poor record of protecting existing ones. Where were the holders of candles, wearers of Gandhi topis and hunger strikers when the offices of the Chief Election Commissioner, the Central Vigilance Commissioner and even the President of the Republic were handed out to persons with dubious credentials? If you didn’t come out to protest the perversion of these institutions why are you somehow more likely to turn up to protest when a dubious person is sought to be made the Jan Lok Pal?"

Anna hazare Bullshit on Anti-Corruption ??

Anna Hazare Bullshit on Anti-Corruption ??
If the Jan Lok Pal presides over the same system that has has corrupted civil servants, politicians, anti-corruption watchdogs, judges, media, civil society groups and ordinary citizens, why should we expect that the ombudsman will be incorruptible? Because the person is handpicked by unelected, unaccountable ‘civil society’ members? Those who propose that Nobel laureates (of Indian origin, not even of Indian citizenship) and Ramon Magsaysay Award winners should be among those who pick the Great Ombudsman of India—who is both policeman and judge—insult the hundreds of millions of ordinary Indian voters who regularly exercise their right to franchise. For they are demanding that the Scandinavian grandees in the Nobel Committee and the Filipino members of the Magsaysay foundation should have an indirect role in selecting an all-powerful Indian official. [See this post at Reality Check India]
The argument that people should be involved in drafting legislation is fine, even if it misses the point that the government is not a foreign entity but a representative of the people. It is entirely other thing to demand that the legislation drafted by an self-appointed, unaccountable and unrepresentative set of people be passed at the threat of blackmail. If we must have representatives of the people involved in lawmaking, we are better off if they are the elected ones, however flawed, as opposed to self-appointed ones, whatever prizes the latter might have won.

The Jan Lok Pal will become another logjammed, politicised and ultimately corrupt institution, for the passionate masses who demand new institutions have a poor record of protecting existing ones. Where were the holders of candles, wearers of Gandhi topis and hunger strikers when the offices of the Chief Election Commissioner, the Central Vigilance Commissioner and even the President of the Republic were handed out to persons with dubious credentials? If you didn’t come out to protest the perversion of these institutions why are you somehow more likely to turn up to protest when a dubious person is sought to be made the Jan Lok Pal?"