Pentagon Cyber Attack Forces 1,500 PCs Off Line

As many as 1,500 computers in the Defense Department were taken off line because of a cyber attack, Pentagon officials said.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he expects systems will recover soon after Wednesday’s attack.

Gates said the Pentagon sees hundreds of attacks a day, and this one had no adverse impact on department operations. Employees whose computers were affected could still use their handheld BlackBerries.

The attack comes several days after several government agencies within the Department of Homeland Security admitted staffers had been attacked more than 800 times in the past two years.

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During a press briefing Gates said of the Pentagon cyber attacks: “We obviously have redundant systems in place. … There will be some administrative disruptions and personal inconveniences.”

He said the Pentagon shut the computers down when a penetration of the system was detected, and the cause is still being investigated.

When asked if his own e-mail account was affected, Gates said: “I don’t do e-mail. I’m a very low-tech person.”

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler, a Pentagon spokesman, said Defense Department systems are probed every day by a wide variety of attacks.

“The nature of the threat is large and diverse, and includes recreational hackers, self-styled cyber-vigilantes, various groups with nationalistic or ideological agendas, transnational actors and nation-states,” Peppler said.

Experts: Russians Planning New Cyberattack

 A resurgence of malware activity in Russia has caught the eye of security vendors.

Recently, researchers at Trend Micro have found a Russian server hosting some 400 pieces of malware that may be part of a forthcoming large-scale attack, while at least one other vendor reported that the country has quickly moved back up on the list of purveyors of Web-based malware.

Paul Ferguson, network architect at Trend Micro, in Cupertino, Calif., said the company ran across the server, which had a “cornucopia of new malware,” the week of July 23.

During an investigation, researchers found there were Web sites with malicious iFrames proxying requests for the malware. The Web sites all had Italian-sounding names and Italian content, but actually resided in a hosting facility in Germany, he said.

An iFrame is an HTML element that makes it possible to embed another HTML document inside the main document.

In this case, the iFrames are believed to have been deliberately inserted by the owners of the Web sites to snare unsuspecting visitors as part of a porn-for-pay scam, Ferguson said.

“Looking at these massive samples of malware, we can’t help [but] think that there’s something brewing in Russia,” wrote researcher Carolyn Guevarra in a blog posting on Trend Micro’s Web site. “We have just seen these cyber-criminals pull the Italian Job recently.”

The operation dubbed “the Italian Job” by Trend Micro researchers involved some 10,000 Web sites with malicious code that redirected visitors to a server booby-trapped with drive-by exploits. The attack used Italian Web sites more than others.

Researchers at Sophos, headquartered in Abingdon, England, have also reported a rise in Web-based malware from Russia. The company’s experts noted in a report about the top 10 Web and e-mail-borne threats for July 2007 that the number of malware-infected Web pages hosted by Russia has increased substantially between June and July, jumping from 3.5 to 14.7 percent.

“This can be explained by the large number of Mal/iFrame and Mal/ObfJS-infected Web pages in Russia that have been compromised to serve as drive-by sites,” the report said.

The Sophos report put China at the top of the list with 49.8 percent and the United States in second place with 21.8 percent.

Malware numbers are growing rapidly, in particular adware, spyware and stealthy, targeted attacks, according to officials at McAfee, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif.

In 2000, McAfee Avert Labs counted about 50,000 unique malicious items. That jumped to 100,000 in 2003, and in August 2006, the 200,000 mark was reached.

McAfee officials said they expect to see the 300,000th unique piece of malicious software, such as worms, viruses or Trojans, this week.

“This statistic underscores how the malware market has shifted from fame to fortune,” said Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager for McAfee Avert Labs. “Bots, adware, spyware and other attacks make up an over $100 billion global market for cyber-crime — surpassing drug trafficking as a global issue from a monetary perspective.”

Online Videos Could Infect Computers With Viruses, Study Finds

Online videos aren’t just for bloopers and rants — some might also be conduits for malicious code that can infect your computer.

As anti-spam technology improves, hackers are finding new vehicles to deliver their malicious code. And some could be embedded in online video players, according to a report on Internet threats released Tuesday by the Georgia Tech Information Security Center as it holds its annual summit.

The summit is gathering more than 300 scholars and security experts to discuss emerging threats for 2008 — and their countermeasures.

Among their biggest foes are the ever-changing vehicles that hackers use to deliver “malware,” which can silently install viruses, probe for confidential info or even hijack a computer.

“Just as we see an evolution in messaging, we also see an evolution in threats,” said Chris Rouland, the chief technology officer for IBM Corp.’s Internet Security Systems unit and a member of the group that helped draft the report. “As companies have gotten better blocking e-mails, we see people move to more creative techniques.”

With computer users getting wiser to e-mail scams, malicious hackers are looking for sneakier ways to spread the codes.

Over the past few years, hackers have moved from sending their spam in text-based messages to more devious means, embedding them in images or disguised as Portable Document Format, or PDF, files.

“The next logical step seems to be the media players,” Rouland said.

There have only been a few cases of video-related hacking so far.

One worm discovered in November 2006 launches a corrupt Web site without prompting after a user opens a media file in a player. Another program silently installs spyware when a video file is opened. Attackers have also tried to spread fake video links via postings on YouTube.

That reflects the lowered guard many computer users would have on such popular forums.

“People are accustomed to not clicking on messages from banks, but they all want to see videos from YouTube,” Rouland said.

Another soft spot involves social networking sites, blogs and wikis. These community-focused sites, which are driving the next generation of Web applications, are also becoming one of the juiciest targets for malicious hackers.

Computers surfing the sites silently communicate with a Web application in the background, but hackers sometimes secretly embed malicious code when they edit the open sites, and a Web browser will unknowingly execute the code.

These chinks in the armor could let hackers steal private data, hijack Web transactions or spy on users.

Tuesday’s forum gathers experts from around the globe to “try to get ahead of emerging threats rather than having to chase them,” said Mustaque Ahamad, director of the Georgia Tech center.

They are expected to discuss new countermeasures, including tighter validation standards and programs that analyze malicious code. Ahamad also hopes the summit will be a launching pad of sorts for an informal network of security-minded programmers.

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Bogus E-Mails Target Top Corporate Executives

During a two-hour period on June 24, something unusual and a bit worrying turned up in e-mail security firm MessageLabs Inc.’s filters: 514 messages tailored to senior executives of corporate clients that contained malicious programs designed to steal sensitive company data.

On Sept. 12 and 13 it happened again, but this time the firm captured 1,100 messages in a 16-hour wave.

The messages, which included executives’ names and titles, were from a purported employment service and offered attachments supposedly containing information on potential job candidates.

The attachments were Microsoft Word documents — a common file type erroneously believed to be safe by most computer users — that if not intercepted would have deposited Trojan horses, or malicious programs disguised as benign ones, onto targeted computers.

The two e-mail bursts point to a new and sophisticated take on an old-style attack with troubling implications for corporations, MessageLabs says.

In the past, most e-mail attacks of this kind have been comparably simple “phishing” scams sent to masses of consumers with the goal of inducing them to part with their financial-account information.

A small number of targeted attacks have been seen by security firms, but they typically targeted individuals in government or the military.

These new attacks, however, suggested a fairly low-tech e-mail scheme could begin to create a high-class problem for significant numbers companies, one in which valuable data are at risk and foolproof technical defenses are challenging.

MessageLabs says that it has been intercepting targeted e-mail attacks on corporate clients for at least three years but that the numbers began to track up significantly only over the last year.

The firm was catching one message a day as of the end of 2006. That number rose to about 10 a day by May and then jumped dramatically with the June and September attacks. Both of those incidents targeted executives in a wide range of industries.

“All of a sudden somebody new hit the scene,” said Mark Sunner, MessageLabs’ chief security analyst.

Who that was isn’t clear because technical tricks disguised the e-mails’ origin, he said. But it’s likely the person or group responsible came from the digital underground centered in Eastern Europe, where malicious-program writers and organized crime have long worked hand-in-hand online to steal and sell data for use in fraud schemes.

The newcomers appear to be after corporate secrets, he said.

They have sought, specifically, to infiltrate the computers of chief executives, chief financial officers, chief technology officers and other senior managers — and on occasion their assistants. And the Trojan horses were primarily designed to help the attacker gather Microsoft Office files from the “My Documents” directory of infiltrated PCs.

The people targeted “are the custodians of the company’s secrets,” Sunner said, and have computers full of juicy spreadsheets, financial reports, merger details and trade secrets.

“Why would somebody be targeting a CEO?” asks Scott O’Neal, chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s cyber-intrusion section. “It may be to steal intellectual property, it may be corporate espionage, it may be to get into the database.”

Attacks of this kind have become much simpler, O’Neal said. “The how-to tutorials out there are getting better and better. And people need less and less technical skills.”

But unfortunately, few are reported to law enforcement because companies fear an investigation will disrupt their businesses and result in unwanted publicity. Such fears are unfounded, he said. The agency is careful not to be disruptive and maintains strict confidentiality.

In the recent attacks seen by MessageLabs, the attackers tried to improve the chances executives would open the Trojan-laced attachments by referencing bogus business matters and including personal details, such as name and title, which suggests the attackers spent time researching their targets.

Adobe: Acrobat, Acrobat Reader Have Security Holes

Adobe Systems Inc. (ADBE), whose software is used by millions of people to read documents sent over the Internet, said on Wednesday some of its programs contain yet-to-be-fixed flaws that make computers vulnerable to attack.

On October 5, Adobe posted a notice on its Web site that said it had unknowingly incorporated vulnerabilities into versions of Adobe Reader and Acrobat software that could allow malicious programs to get on to a PC without the user’s knowledge.

Such malicious software can take control of a machine and steal confidential data, send out tens of thousands of spam e-mails, or infiltrate government computer systems.

Adobe said it believes the flaws only affect computers running Microsoft Corp’s (MSFT) Windows XP operating system and Internet Explorer 7 Web browser. Adobe said it was working to rectify the problem but the fix might not be available until the end of October.

Some security experts say that may not be soon enough to stop hackers determined to get malicious software past firewalls and other security software programs.

“Users should pressure Adobe to release a patch sooner than that,” said Gadi Evron, a security expert at Beyond Security. He has organized three closed-door international conferences on efforts by governments and private companies to fight computer attacks.

Malicious software is a common problem. Recent examples have corrupted eBay Inc’s (EBAY) Skype Internet telephone service and Time Warner Inc’s (TWX) AOL instant messaging software.

Hackers sometimes hide malicious software inside Microsoft Word documents and photo files, hobbling computers when users open them.

Some security experts said that what makes the Adobe case disturbing is that it came to light before the company had a solution to fix the problem, which means hackers have an opportunity to exploit the situation.

The software maker would have preferred to hold off on notifying the public of the flaws in Acrobat and Reader until the updated software was ready, said John Landwehr, Adobe’s director of security solutions and strategy.

Earlier on Tuesday, Adobe disclosed “critical problems” in versions of three design programs, GoLive, Illustrator and Pagemaker, and simultaneously released software to repair the problems.

“That is the standard practice,” Landwehr told Reuters. “There is a protocol that is fairly well understood.”

But, Landwehr said, in the case of Acrobat and Reader, Adobe had to report the problem before the fix because it was reported on October 5 on security Web site http://www.heise-security.co.uk. Adobe disclosed it later that day on its own Web site.

Adobe has posted instructions on its Web site for working around the problem, www.adobe.com/support/security/.

But Landwehr said the instructions are mainly for administrators who run corporate networks, not consumers.

Adobe said PC users who are unable to program that database to fix it may need to wait until the software itself is fixed. The company said it would notify users on its Web site.

Rival browsers Firefox, www.firefox.com, and Opera, www.opera.com, have not reported any similar problems.

Leopard Doesn’t Seem to Be a Secure Operating System

Apple Inc. has launched Leopard and everyone has been happy. But it seems that this move is somehow similar to the iPhone experience. After just a few days or weeks since the product has been released, the troubles have started to appear. In Leopard’s case it seems that Apple Inc. has hurried to release the new version of its Mac OS X, and this way hasn’t been able to offer a secure operating system as they would have wanted.

Although the security features that the famous American company has added to Leopard look greet on paper, in practice most of them are half-baked or just useless, according to the security researchers. Furthermore, this security issue comes to add to another recently discovered problem involved Leopard. It seems that the new Mac operating system is slowly “killing” the users’ wireless connections. Whether there is a connection between these two recently discovered problems one could not know till now.

Rich Mogull, one of Gartner Inc.’s annalists, has said that he thinks “that this is the most significant update in the OS X line when it comes to security.”. But he has as well added that “Apple didn’t finish the job. There’s a lot of room for improvement here.” It appears that Apple Inc. has really been in a hurry. This hypothesis seems correct if one remembers that some time ago the annalists and users have been asking themselves whether Apple will launch Leopard in October, as promised. Apple Inc. had already delayed once Leopard’s release because of its iPhone project.

And now it all makes sense, after all. Apple has launched Leopard in October, as promised, but the OS is not finished and the users are exposed to security threats. This problem comes despite that fact that Apple Inc. touts more than a dozen of new security features and tool in its new operating system.

Stop or the System will Shoot!

The volume and sophistication of attacks that threaten business e-mail networks and systems is growing at exponential rates. This growth curve poses significant problems for IT and security groups trying to manage these threats, not to mention user inboxes filled with junk that they must wade through every morning.

Recently, however, a new solution has emerged that places an additional message security layer at the network edge, significantly strengthening a company’s overall messaging security posture, and effectively stopping spam before it can get to users.

But first, just how big is the spam problem, and why should you be concerned? According to recent studies, the current volume of overall e-mail sent worldwide is now over 75 billion messages per day. By 2008, this number is expected to rise to a volume of 100 billion per day or more.

About 85 percent of all e-mail worldwide is “unwanted”, a percentage that has been growing steadily over time. Unwanted e-mail includes spam, viruses, malware, Trojans, denial-of-service, and phishing attacks. Even more troublesome is that the volume of total unwanted e-mail is doubling every six to nine months.

Threats to corporate e-mail security can be grouped into four primary categories: spam, phishing, viruses, and zombies. Spam is broadly defined as any message that is unsolicited and unwanted, or “junk mail”. Phishing is a scam in which fraudsters “fish” for personal information by pretending to be a legitimate company.

Viruses come in many forms. Some are intended merely to cause a nuisance and block network traffic temporarily, while others, such as Trojans, contain or install a malicious program or payload.

And zombies are the newest threat to enterprise network security. A zombie PC is one that has been taken over by a remote hacker through the use of Trojans, which are files that appear to be legitimate but instead are viruses that hijack a PC and use it to send spam, viruses, DoS attacks, and phishing scams. These zombie machines are networked and used in conjunction with each other to send thousands of messages each, often targeting specific entities.

While each of these categories poses a unique threat to e-mail security, many attacks combine several elements to exploit multiple vulnerabilities simultaneously, adding to the problem.

Unwanted e-mail is also becoming more difficult to detect, mainly because attackers are professionals with the budget and technical prowess to develop spam, phishing attacks, viruses, and zombies that can get through existing filters. Gone are the days of lone hackers working late at night. Many of these hackers run teams of engineers with very sophisticated equipment and technology.

The fact is that professional hacking teams typically have all the same security software that corporations do, and will constantly test their strategies to see if they can outsmart the filters.

One example of this is hash busting text, where spammers will have their zombie networks send out e-mails that are each unique and cannot be recognized with a hash. Another example is the increasing use of image-based spam, where all the text is in image format, and even the images can be made to vary uniquely (more hash busting). This makes it very difficult to detect e-mail based solely on the content of the e-mail.

The net result is that the reputation of the sender is becoming more and more important as a way to detect unwanted e-mail. Legitimate senders with good reputations will rarely send spam, and if their systems are ever compromised by a zombie, their reputation score will almost immediately reflect that, and their e-mails can be flagged as unwanted until their systems and corresponding score returns to normal.

Every message that crosses the corporate gateway uses valuable bandwidth, which is already in short supply for most organizations. IT departments are being forced to add additional mail security gateways and mail servers to their infrastructure as the volume of mail outstrips the capacity of their existing machines.

Considering that the inbound mail volume at many companies is doubling every three to four months, mainly due to bad e-mails, it’s easy to see that IT departments have a significant challenge on their hands trying to purchase, test, and install the components of their rapidly growing e-mail infrastructure.

So what are the options to solve this problem? Some companies simply wish to add hardware into their architecture, but considering the growth rate of inbound e-mail, to double or triple hardware and infrastructure costs every 6-9 months is simply not in the budget.

To take a more proactive approach, many administrators are starting to use products or services that look at the sender’s reputation. By doing so, they hope to eliminate bad e-mail at the connection (network or TCP/IP) level. While the intent is laudable, the issues with many of these reputation services are numerous.

For example, by deploying an e-mail gateway Message Transfer Agent (MTA), such as Sendmail, Postfix, or any other number of alternatives, administrators attempt to cut down the number of messages passing through. Unfortunately, each of these solutions requires additional levels of security in order to effectively reduce message volume to a tolerable level.

Rather than trying to add more hardware and multiple new layers to the infrastructure, consider another approach. A typical (simplified) messaging architecture involves e-mail traversing the network edge, followed by the e-mail security gateway, and finally the e-mail server.

The intelligence in these e-mail security gateway products employs multiple techniques, including anti-virus scanning, deep content inspection, filtering for keywords and heuristics, and custom rules. More recently, the notion of a sender’s reputation as a key factor in categorizing and managing inbound e-mail has emerged as a critical step in the process.

Rather than continuing to add secure gateway hardware to the infrastructure to handle growing e-mail volumes, a better approach would be to add security intelligence at the network edge, cutting down the e-mail that passes on to the e-mail security gateways and servers for further inspection and processing.

One such system that’s beginning to gain currency is a software module loaded on to application delivery networking device – a network edge solution that adds security intelligence to manage and filter inbound e-mail traffic by considering the sender’s reputation when making traffic management decisions. The device leverages a reputation system for information about every sender that attempts to connect to the protected enterprise’s mail servers.

When the device receives an SMTP connection request, it will hold the response to the sender until the sender’s reputation is checked against the reputation database. Neither the SMTP headers, nor any part of the message itself is downloaded until the sender’s reputation is determined.

What’s cool about this is that the administrator has incredible flexibility in determining what to do with the e-mail based on that reputation, including partitioning e-mail traffic between various pools of e-mail gateways and servers for “fast-tracking” known good senders, redirecting senders with questionable reputations, and immediately dropping known bad sender connections with an error code telling them not to retry the connection, as it will only lead to another rejection.

By filtering out known spam senders with this device, administrators can eliminate the majority of their e-mail volume right at the network edge. This significantly cuts down on the bandwidth and expanding hardware costs required to deal with the remaining e-mail passed on to existing security gateways and mail servers, and helps maximize existing messaging security solutions already in place.

In sum, when the load and risk imposed on networks by unwanted e-mail is growing, historical single-layer deep inspection architectures for dealing with high volumes of spam are no longer enough. What is needed is a fast growing breed of smart systems that manage to stop spam at the network edge, before it burdens systems, user productivity, and patience!

Hackers are always just one step behind

Like many organisations, American Century Casualty Co. (ACCC), an insurance company based in Houston, US, used to insist that its network access be restricted to users on the corporate LAN (local area network), as narrates Charlie Rubin in a recent article in Communications News (www.comnews.com).

ACCC had to think of a policy change ‘during the year-end holiday break in 2006, when some of the state-wide claims managers asked if they could do some work from home’. However, Stephen Gentilozzi, the company’s IT manager, had no real solution for the managers at the time.

“We gave them access through our Citrix client as a temporary fix, but we also started looking for a permanent solution that would satisfy our users as well as our own security requirements,” he would recount to Rubin. “The goal was to eventually provide some 150 claims managers, field appraisers and other executives with anytime, anywhere access to the corporate network, with full security.”

Gentilozzi was looking for ‘a secure socket layer virtual private network (SSL VPN),’ which would allow access from any browser-based PC (personal computer). And the product that he zeroed in on, early this year, was SSL VPN-Plus from NeoAccel, a company founded by an Indian entrepreneur, Michel Susai.

“The solution took less than two hours to deploy, and ACCC first rolled it out to claims managers and adjusters,” informs Susai, sharing his success case study with Business Line. “Users immediately liked the ease of installation, and some noticed better network response time than they had gotten with the old IPsec VPN solution.”

With a successful rollout to claims managers and underwriting managers complete, Gentilozzi will soon add the appraisers who take photos and handle estimates with body shops, he adds.

Susai, a B.S. in computer science and engineering from the Pune Institute of Computer Technology and Research, describes himself as ‘a serial entrepreneur and an innovator of pioneering technologies that optimise the performance of Internet applications,’ with ‘a passion for pure science and innovation’. He likes to transform his ideas ‘into industry changing business applications’.

NeoAccel, headquartered in the US, and with development offices in Mumbai and Pune, is ‘backed by strategic investors such as Sabeer Bhatia, Silicon Valley investor Prabhu Goel and venture fund NTT Leasing, who have pooled in around five million dollars into the start-up’.

Excerpts from the e-mail interview.

There is no end to security concerns because there is no end to hacking. Isn’t this an on-going process?

Yes, security is an ongoing process, just as learning is. Computer technology was developed to provide solutions, but we have learned how hackers have leveraged the same technology to misuse and steal valuable information. The trend right now is for software vendors to fix problems in their solutions and come up with more secure solutions. But at the same time, hackers are finding loopholes in new technology and are able to circumvent this new security. So it’s a learning process: software vendors keep finding potential flaws and fixing them, and hackers keep finding new flaws.

But no matter how secure technology and solutions become, there is always a method to break into it. The reason being the core concept of computers: a computer is nothing but a machine that maps one symbol to another. A hacker can always use brute force techniques to break into any kind of security. Software vendors just make just hacker’s work harder but cannot stop them from working.

For example, data encryption is considered to be the strongest security technology ever developed. But it is still not 100 per cent hacker-free. Given infinite time and processing power hackers can still break any kind of encryption.

Some enthusiast broke into Google’s server. How did that happen?

Considering that security is meant to make a hacker’s job harder, even a single flaw that provides hackers a shorter path to achieve their goals makes all technology solutions vulnerable to hackers.

A software solution is usually a combination of multiple security and non-security domain technologies. The security holes lie at the boundary where one technology integrates with other. For example, a solution might have strong authentication features to identify users, but the security might get compromised when the browser has cached the session key in cookies to provide seamless access to users across different applications and domains.

Any solution that is not well designed to handle the integration boundary issues is prone to getting hacked, and this can happen with any of the reputable solutions. Google is no exception.

What happened at Google was an error in Google’s domain name system (DNS) – not a hack. DNS translates domain names (google.com) into addresses (123.456.789.123) and, most likely, a maintenance in Google’s DNS was caught by an enthusiast and was able to take advantage of it (by re-directing visitors to Google’s Web site) for a very short time. Nevertheless, this points out that even if you think no one (i.e., a hacker) is watching, they actually are!

What is the state-of-the-art defence mechanism against hackers? How is your VPN superior to the substitutes available in the market?

A state-of-the-art defence mechanism is to have “security by design”. Each and every technology has to be validated as per the solution requirement and should be integrated without leaving any gap in integration. Three requirements for a VPN solution are: authentication, integrity and confidentiality.

NeoAccel has implemented an industry-standard implementation of the latest technologies to develop a state-of-the-art solution. NeoAccel uses SSL, an Internet encryption standard, to address integrity and confidentiality factors. Our strengths are: strong authentication, information control, strong encryption, and a secure hardware platform to run these capabilities on.

NeoAccel does not claim to be a flawless solution because hackers are always just one step behind. With a complete analysis of current technologies, they are almost ready to break the most secure solutions today!

Is anyone thinking of unified e-defence application that will forever bar hackers?

Computer software started as a facilitation tool. Take information access as an example: there was a need to “access” information so the Internet was born. Then came a requirement to for “remote access”, so that information is accessible from anywhere.

Until now, information was accessible only to authorised resources from authorised sources. With remote access technologies came a threat of information leaks, and so we are talking about “secure remote access”, and people are working on building unified e-defence applications for common people.

Unfortunately, adoption to security has been slow because security comes with restrictions and cost. We are giving due importance to security; but we are still giving more importance to “facilitation” than to “control”.

We will, therefore, see a new generation of applications that will defend itself from attackers. An e-defence application will detect when it is being attacked. It will respond by blocking access to such resources as a first level of security and then try to trace the attacker. Application could be intelligent to set up a trap, let the attacker enter the system and then doom the offender.

There are technologies in place, like intrusion detection systems (IDS), intrusion prevention systems (IPS), ‘Honeypots’, and others. Honeypots lure hackers into what appears to be a real server, but is actually a server specifically designed to identify the hacker. But these are still peripheral technologies. An e-defence application will combine all these technologies to build a single solution. Reassuringly, though, sophisticated technologies are already being used by government organisations working on detecting cybercrimes.

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Short bio:

Susai founded NeoAccel in 2005. In his earlier company NetScaler, he could significantly improve Web content delivery for large enterprises and service providers, using ‘request switching technology’. ‘Today, over 75 per cent of global Web traffic is processed through a NetScaler appliance, such as Amazon.com, Google, and MSN. NetScaler was acquired by Citrix Systems for $300 million. Prior to NetScaler, Mr. Susai was responsible for developing several Internet infrastructure scalability products at Sun Microsystems, and led the development of the Internet strategy initiative at Unisys.’

Yahoo Hack Day breaks into India

A motley crew of some 100 Web developers gathered at Taj Residency here for Yahoo’s Open Hack Day, which made its first appearance in Asia over the weekend.

The one-day event on Friday attracted students, employees of software companies and even the unemployed, who toiled over 24 hours to create new applications based on Yahoo’s application programming interfaces (APIs) and technology.

This was the third in a series of Open Hack Day held over the past year, and the first in Asia. Yahoo kicked off its inaugural Hack Day in Sunnyvale, United States, in September 2006, and held the second one in London, United Kingdom, in June this year.

In the software parlance, hacking refers to the “modification of a program or device to give users access to features that were otherwise unavailable to them”. Thus, hacks are not necessarily always conducted with malicious intent.

“Hack Days were initially started for Yahoo employees,” said David Filo, founder of Yahoo, who was in town for the occasion. He noted that the Internet company previously gave its developers a day off to venture into projects that may not be part of their daily tasks.

“The response was overwhelming,” Filo said. “And that’s when we decided to extend Hack Days to everyone, whether they work at Yahoo or anywhere else.”

Bradley Horowitz, vice president of Yahoo’s advanced development division, explained that Hack Day will allow the company to “empower” anyone to be a creator and make it “even easier for them to build the next generation of Web [applications]”.

According to Filo, there are currently some 500 million Yahoo users worldwide. “But we know that a large chunk of the next half billion will come from emerging markets, such as India, Latin America, Middle East and other Southeast Asian countries,” he said.

He added that the profile of the next half a billion users is going to be very different from that of existing Yahoo users. “Events like the Open Hack Day, is one way of getting to know what value Yahoo can offer to this next half a billion population,” Filo added.

And the winners are…
On Friday, Yahoo set up a staging area at India’s Taj Residency, complete with desks, Wi-Fi connectivity, a stop-watch and bean bags, and provided hotdogs, India’s local kathi bread rolls, pastries, biscuits and cold beverages.

Some of the participants chose to work alone, while others worked in groups. A majority of them stayed awake through the night to work on their applications.

At the end of the 24-hour deadline, there were 31 submissions and a member from each participating team had 90 seconds to showcase their hacks.

The “Best in Show” award went to an application called “Maps Doodle”, which integrated Yahoo Maps with a canvas overlay. The tool allows users to doodle on maps or highlight routes to specific destinations, in more user-friendly functions than creating codes using the API. For example, the user’s movements are recorded as he draws out the route. He can then send an URL link, which his friends can access to replay the path he drew out.

The “Brainiest Hack” award went to an application dubbed “YaHealer”, a Yahoo Widget that allows doctors to collaborate and share medical files and photos online.

In total, Yahoo acknowledged 10 applications at the event.

Hackday: Hackers come out of the dark

HACKING IS NOT a job done just by suspicious characters sitting in small rooms in undisclosed locations, trying to break into military installations or robbing banks, as shown in Hollywood films or even poorly-shot Bollywood movies. The stereotyped image of hackers was put to rest by around 200 software developers in a two-day event called ‘Hackday’ organised by Yahoo in Bangalore and London. “Don’t call it an event. It’s a camp,” said a hacker.    

The developers or ‘hackers’ came all prepared with sleeping bags, for this 24-hour marathon of punching furiously on the keyboard to hack, hack, eat, rest and hack. The Taj Residency, where it was organised, looked like a command centre in a futuristic war movie.   

All participants were provided physical and mental sustenance throughout the event, with plenty of fuel (food, in this case) served. Hackday was a straight dive into 24 hours of hacking on a collection of tools, such as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and data. Developers, to make programmes usable to a particular platform, use APIs.    

At the end of the first Hackday in India, that had around 200 hackers participating, the hackers submitted 31 ‘hacks’. Each hacker had his/ her 90 seconds of fame while presenting the hack on three massive screens to the assembled audience, as well as the seven judges.

According to the Yahoo Developers’ Forum, all the hacks were of high quality, including the ones created by the Indian hackers that didn’t fall into a stereotypical format. Some of the titles awarded were ‘Best non-technical hack’, ‘Best desktop hack’, ‘I wish I had a Mac Hack’, ‘Most viral hack’, ‘Most likely to arrive at next hack day on time hack’ and ‘Brainiest hack’. 

“We want to thank all the hackers for putting so much effort into it and coming up with such a wide range of hacks and ideas,” said Chris Heilmann, one of the organisers.

Hackday, in a way, was not only about hacking. People could be seen chatting with fellow hackers about movies that were playing in the town or the latest DVD game that is ruling the market, or things like the Champions League. Hackday may have come and gone, but good hackers would remain.