Saturday, September 5, 2009

How to Protect an Email Account from being Hacked

Today in this post I’ll teach you how to protect your email account from being hacked. Nowadays I get a lot of emails where most of the people say “My Email account is hacked please help…”. Now one question which arises in our mind is:”Is it so easy to hack an email account? OR Is it so difficult to protect an email account from being hacked?”. The single answer to these two questions is “Absolutely NOT!”. It is neither easy to hack an email nor difficult to protect an email account from bieng hacked.

If this is the case, then what is the reason for many people to loose their accounts?
The answer is very simple. They don’t know how to protect themselves from being hacked! In fact most of the people who loose their email accounts are not the victims of hacking but the victims of Trapping. They loose their passwords not because they are hacked by some expert hackers but they are fooled to such an extent that they themselves give away their password.

Are you confused? If so continue reading and you’ll come to know…

Now I’ll mention some of the most commonly used online scams which fool people and make them loose their passwords. I’ll also mention how to protect your email account from these scams.

1. WEBSITE SPOOFING

Website spoofing is the act of creating a website, with the intention of misleading the readers. The website will be created by a different person or organisation (Other than the original)especially for the purposes of cheating. Normally, the website will adopt the design of the target website and sometimes has a similar URL.

Fake Yahoo Login

For example a Spoofed Website of Yahoo.com appears exactly same as Yahoo Website. So most of the people believe that it is the original site and loose their passwords. The main intention of spoofed websites is to fool users and take away their passwords. For this,the spoofed sites offer fake login pages. These fake login pages resemble the original login pages of sites like Yahoo,Gmail,Orkut etc. Since it resemble’s the original login page people beleive that it is true and give away their username and passwords by trying to login to their accounts.

Solution:

  • Never try to login/access your email account from the sites other than the original site.
  • Always type the URL of the site in the address bar to get into the site.Never click on the hyperlink to enter the site.

2. BY USING KEYLOGGERS

The other commonly used method to steal password is by using a Keylogger. A Keylogger is nothing but a spyware. The detailed description of keylogger and it’s usage is discussed in the post Hacking an email account. If you read this post you’ll come to know that it is too easy to steal the password using a keylogger program. If you just access your email account from a computer installed with keylogger, you definitely loose your password. This is because the keylogger records each and every keystroke that you type.

Solution:

Protecting yourselves from a keylogger scam is very easy.Just install a good anti-spyware program and update it regularly. This keeps your PC secure from a keylogger. Also there is a program called Anti-keylogger which is specially designed to detect and remove keyloggers. You can use this program to detect some stealth keyloggers which remain undetected by many anti-spyware programs.
3. ACCESSING YOUR EMAIL ACCOUNT FROM CYBER CAFES

Do you access your email from cyber cafes? Then definitely you are under the risk of loosing your password.In fact many people loose their email account in cyber cafes. For the owner of the cyber cafe it’s just a cakewalk to steal your password. For this he just need’s to install a keylogger on his computers. So when you login to your email account from this PC, you give away your password to the cafe owner. Also there are many Remote Administration Tools (RATs) which can be used to monitor your browsing activities in real time.

This doesn’t mean that you should never use cyber cafes for browsing the internet. I know, not all the cyber cafe owners will be so wicked but it is recommended not to use cafes for accessing confidential information. If it comes to the matter of security never trust anyone, not even your friend. I always use my own PC to login to my accounts to ensure safety.

How to Protect an Email Account from SPAM



Most of us get SPAM every day. Some of us get more and some little. Even a newly created email account will begin to receive spam just after a few days of it’s creation. Many times we wonder where these spam come from and why? But this question remains unanswered within ourselves. So in this post I will try my best to give every possible information about the spam and will also tell you about how to combat spam.

What is SPAM?

Spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. Most widely recognized form of spam is email spam.

Where do these SPAM come from?

These spam come only from spammers and never from a legitimate user or a company. These spammers send a single email to hundreds (some times thousands or millions) of email addresses at a time. They either send it manually or use spambots to automate the process of spamming.

Why do spammers SPAM?

The main goal of spammers is to send the spam (unsolicited bulk messages) to as many people as possible in order to make profit. For example, John builds a small website to sell an ebook which gives information about weight loss. In order to make sales he needs publicity for his website. Instead of spending money on advertising, John decides to create an email which contains information about his site along with it’s link and send this email to say 100 email addresses in his contact list. If 1 person out of hundred buy this book john gets $10. What if he sends this email to 1000s of email addresses. He gets $100. Imagine, if he sends this email to 1 Million email addresses he gets $100000.

Now I hope you understood the idea behind spamming. So in order to make money, spammers send their advertising emails to as many people as possible without respecting the recipient’s privacy.

From where do SPAMmers get my email address?

On the Internet there exists many sites who collect the email IDs of people and sell them to spammers in bulk. Most often, people sign up for monthly newsletters and take up surveys. This is the time where these scam sites get their email addresses. Also many spammers collect email addresses by using spambots. These spambots collect email addresses from the Internet in order to build mailing lists. Such spambots are web crawlers that can gather email addresses from Web sites, newsgroups, forums, special-interest group (SIG) postings, and chat-room conversations.

Spammers also use the trick of creating Hoax Emails for gathering a huge list of email IDs. For example, a spammer sends a hoax email which says “Forward this Message to Help Severely Burned Child”. This email claims that 11 cents will be donated to the child’s family every time the message is sent to others. Most of the people believe this and start forwarding this hoax email to all of the IDs in their contact list. In this way the email spreads rapidly and eventually when it reaches the creator (spammer), the spammer gets a huge list of valid email addresses in the email header. When you get these kind of hoax emails, you can see for yourself in the email header which contains a huge list of email addresses of all those people to whom the email is being forwarded to. This is one of the effective methods used by spammers to gather email addresses.

Is SPAMming legal?

Spamming is completely illegal. Yet it is really difficult to stop spammers from spamming since they keep moving from one hosting company to another after getting banned. This makes it practically impossible to catch spammers and prosecute them.

How to protect my email account from getting SPAMmed?

The following methods can be used to combat email spam.

1. Use spam filters for your email account. If you’re using email services like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc. then spam filters are used by defaut. Each spam filter has it’s algorithm to detect spam emails and will automatically move them to SPAM folder. This keeps your inbox free from spam. However some spam emails become successful to make their way into the inbox by successfully bypassing the filters.

2. Do not post your email address in public forums, user comments and chat-rooms. Give your email address only to trustworthy websites while signing up for newsletters.

3. While taking up online surveys and filling up feedback forms, it is better not to give your personal email address. Instead singup for a dummy email account and use this for surveys and feedback forms.

4. While posting your contact email address on your website use this format: emailaddress [at] yoursite.com instead of emailaddress@yoursite.com. This protects your email address from being indexed by spambots.

5. Do not respond to hoax messages. When you receive a hoax email, avoid forwarding it to your friends. Examples of hoax messages can be found at www.hoax-slayer.com. If you really want to forward it to your friends, make sure that you use “Bcc” (blind certified copy) option to send the email. This will hide all the email IDs to which the mail is forwarded to.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Stoned Bootkit – Windows XP, 2003, Vista,

What is Stoned Bootkit?

A bootkit is a boot virus that is able to hook and patch Windows to get load into the Windows kernel, and thus getting unrestricted access to the entire computer. It is even able to bypass full volume encryption, because the master boot record (where Stoned is stored) is not encrypted. The master boot record contains the decryption software which asks for a password and decrypts the drive. This is the weak point, the master boot record, which will be used to pwn your whole system. No one’s secure!

For whom is Stoned Bootkit interesting?

  1. Black Hats
  2. Law enforcement agencies
  3. Microsoft

Why is Stoned something new? Because it is the firts bootkit that..

  • attacks Windows XP, Sever 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7 with one single master boot record
  • attacks TrueCrypt full volume encryption
  • has integrated FAT and NTFS drivers
  • has an integrated structure for plugins and boot applications (for future development)

A bootkit is a rootkit that is able to load from a master boot record and persist in memory all the way through the transition to protected mode and the startup of the OS. It’s a very interesting type of rootkit.” – Robert Hensing about bootkits

You can download Stoned Bootkit here:

Open Source Framework – Stoned Bootkit Framework.zip
Infector file – Infector.exe

Or you can read more here.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

About ISRO’s Bhuvan







About BHUVAN

Bhuvan gives you an easy way to experience, explore and visualize IRS images over Indian region
ISRO is well known amongst space faring nations for its world-leading reputation in developing new, indigenous and innovative service oriented applications using remote sensing technology. Over the past 2 decades, ISRO has mastered the art of developing these unique applications using various spectral, spatial and temporal resolutions offered by the versatile IRS satellites and these have been successfully institutionalized in many important areas of policy making, natural resources management, disaster support, and enhancing the quality of life across all sections of the society.

Bhuvan is an initiative to showcase this distinctiveness of Indian imaging capabilities including the thematic information derived from such imagery which could be of vital importance to common man with a focus on Indian region. Bhuvan, an ambitious project of ISRO to take Indian images and thematic information in multiple spatial resolutions to people through a web portal through easy access to information on basic natural resources in the geospatial domain. Bhuvan showcases Indian images by the superimposition of these IRS satellite imageries on 3D globe. It displays satellite images of varying resolution of India’s surface, allowing users to visually see things like cities and important places of interest looking perpendicularly down or at an oblique angle, with different perspectives and can navigate through 3D viewing environment. The degree of resolution showcased is based on the points of interest and popularity, but most of the Indian terrain is covered upto at least 5.8 meters of resolution with the least spatial resolution being 55 meters from AWifs Sensor. With such rich content, Bhuvan opens the door to graphic visualisation of digital geospatial India allowing individuals to experience the fully interactive terrain viewing capabilities.

Multi-resolution images from multi-sensor IRS satellites of India is seamlessly depicted through the Bhuvan web portal by enabling a common man to zoom into specific area of interest at high resolution. Bhuvan brings a whole lot of uniqueness in understanding our own natural resources whilst presenting beautiful images and thematic vectors generated from varieties of geospatial information. Bhuvan will also attempt to bring out the importance of multi-temporal data and to highlight the changes taking place to our natural resources, which will serve as a general awareness on our changing planet. There are lot more special value added services which will be enabled onto the web portal in due course of time and each one of those services are going to be unique to preserving and conserving our precious natural resources through public participation. We are sure the common man will get rich benefits from these Indian geospatial data services in days to come.

Basic features of Bhuvan:

  • Access, explore and visualise 2D and 3D image data along with rich thematic information on Soil, wasteland, water resources etc.
  • Visualise multi-resolution, multi-sensor, multi-temporal image data
  • Superpose administrative boundaries of choice on images as required
  • Visualisation of AWS ( Automatic Weather Stations) data/information in a graphic view and use tabular weather data of user choice
  • Fly to locations ( Flies from the current location directly to the selected location)
  • Heads-Up Display ( HUD) naviation controls ( Tilt slider, north indicator, opacity, compass ring, zoom slider)
  • Navigation using the 3D view Pop-up menu (Fly-in, Fly out, jump in, jump around, view point)
  • 3D Fly through (3D view to fly to locations, objects in the terrain, and navigate freely using the mouse or keyboard)
  • Drawing 2D objects (Text labels, polylines, polygons, rectangles, 2D arrows, circles, ellipse)
  • Drawing 3D Objects (placing of expressive 3D models, 3D polygons, boxes)
  • Snapshot creation (copies the 3D view to a floating window and allows to save to a external file)
  • Measurement tools (Horizontal distance, aerial distance, vertical distance, measure area)
  • Shadow Analysis (it sets the sun position based on the given time creating shadows and effects the lighting on the terrain)
  • There would be many more value added functions and facilities which will be added into the package from time to time.
  • Particular interest of ISRO/DOS would be to provide such functionalities to common man so that he/she adopts participatory approach with scientists to solve simple problems easily and interactively.

Advanced functionalities to be provided in future versions

Urban Design Tools (to build roads, junctions and traffic lights in an urban setting)
  • Contour map ( Displays a colorized terrain map and contour lines)
  • Terrain profile ( Displays the terrain elevation profile along a path)
  • Draw tools (Creates simples markers, free hand lines, urban designs)
  • Navigation map (to jump to and view locations in the 3D India)

What is Bhuvan?
Bhuvan is a geoportal that provides medium to high resolution satellite imagery of virtually the entire India over the internet. You can "fly" around using mouse and keyboard on a simple desktop computer with virtual globe in front draped with IRS images over Indian region. Many other features are built in, including 3D terrain and information on many thematic data.

What can Bhuvan do for me?
Bhuvan is a free web based image portal. Most Image visualization programs are very expensive and complex. Bhuvan provides a fast and friendly way to look at IRS satellite data and thematic information in geographic context, which is invaluable for management, planning and visualization. Additionally, Bhuvan makes it easy to share digital data between people and computers anytime, anywhere. Over a period of time a lot more unique functionalities will be added into this tool to address common man’s problems, particularly in the rural setup of India and addressing natural resources management issues.

What do I require to run Bhuvan on my Machine?
You require the Bhuvan Plug-in which can be downloaded from the Bhuvan website after registration and you will also need DirectX8 or higher version (www.microsoft.com/windows/directx/) for installing the plug-in. Please note that the Bhuvan Plug-in can be installed with administrative privileges only.

How do I use Bhuvan?
When you first open Bhuvan website, You will land on the index page which gives you information on Bhuvan and this page also allows you to register for using the Bhuvan. Once you successfully register, you will land on the Bhuvan 3D client page. Here, there are three primary areas of the program that you'll be using. The main window shows a globe, and you can navigate around with your mouse or use the Heads-Up Display (HUD) option available on the right top corner. Double right click to zoom in, and double left click to zoom out (or use your mousewheel). Right click, hold, and drag to pan. The second area is at the upper right of the main window. When you move your mouse over the navigation compass, it give you more movement options such as rotate and tilt (which you can also do with your mouse). The third area is to the left of the main window. This frame includes a fly to location and fly to important places option. On the top of the globe are the menu options for layers, 2D and 3D drawing, measurement tools, snapshot tools etc. When you select any of these options, you see the context options on the left plane where you can make appropriate choices that you can turn on to make visible in the main windows such as roads, 3D terrain, and more.

Can I use Bhuvan if I don't have a fast internet connection?
Yes. Bhuvan is designed to be as bandwidth-friendly as possible. However, it is dependent on continuously downloading a large amount of imagery. Consequently, the faster your connection, the better the program will perform. If you have a slow connection, Bhuvan will download imagery correspondingly slowly, but it will (eventually) download everything at the maximum available resolution. Depending on the number of concurrent users on over servers and the kind of bandwidth at client end the ultimate speed of visualisation will be decided. This is a beta release, however with more learnings we will be able to make things more comfortable for all types of users.

Can I use Bhuvan if I'm not connected to the internet?
No. You will have to be connected to Internet for using Bhuvan.

How current is the imagery in Bhuvan?

Bhuvan portal does NOT display data in real-time. The images you see are a combination of satellite imagery from various IRS sensors taken (generally) sometime within the last three years during different seasons. Bhuvan, on release, contains IRS satellite images from OCM, AWifs, LISS 3, and LISS 4 sensor images and will be added with more data from time to time. Bhuvan is constantly updating its database to use more recent and higher resolution images. You can explore the metadata content to determine when exactly a specific area was imaged, but you may be able to use landmarks to generalize a date range if you are familiar with the area.

How do I bookmark a place in Bhuvan?
Zoom to the location that you'd like to bookmark (placemark, more accurately), use the draw tool to place an icon. After you save the placemark, it will stay in the frame to the left of the main window, and double clicking on it will zoom you to that position.

Can I add my own data into Bhuvan?
No. In the current version, you will not be able to add your own data

Do I have to register to use Bhuvan?
Yes. It is mandatory to register to use Bhuvan.

How much does Bhuvan cost?
The basic version of Bhuvan is free. Once you register and you login, you will be asked to download the Bhuvan plug-in. Accept the installation of the plug-in and you are ready to use the full features of Bhuvan.

What are the System Requirements for Using Bhuvan?

Requirements for Windows

  • Operating System: Windows XP/Vista
  • CPU: Pentium 4 2.4GHz+ or AMD 2400xp+
  • System Memory (RAM): 512MB
  • Hard Disk: 2GB free space
  • Network Speed: 768 Kbits/sec
  • Graphics Card: 3D-capable with 32MB of VRAM
  • Screen: 1280x1024, "32-bit True Color"

Can I run Bhuvan on Mac OS and Linux?
No at the moment Bhuvan can run only on windows system and is optimised for IE 6. or higher

What type of data can I see in Bhuvan?
You will be able to see the following data on Bhuvan

  • Satellite imagery (LISS III , LISS IV along with metadata and Multi- temporal Data from OCM & AWiFS)
  • Value added information (NADAMS – National Agricultural Drought Monitoring System), Output of flood studies for certain areas,
  • Thematic information (Wastelands, Soils, watershed,water resources related maps)
  • Base layers ( administrative boundaries, transport layers, water bodies, etc)
  • Census information
  • Metadata

What do I do when I get the ‘’DD_ERR Video Ram Memory’’ error?
Close all other applications and relaunch Bhuvan.


Bhuvan ISRO Website - bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in - Bhuvan 3D Tool

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) official website of Indian Earth Observation and Visualization is www.bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in, Today (12 August, 2009) the Beta web 3D tool announced. It is very useful to anybody see the full coverage of Indian Region. The web tool is discover and explore earth in 3D space with specific emphasis on Indian region.

Minister of State in the PMO Prithviraj Chavan launched the beta version of the geoportal www.bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in on Today. It is day-long workshop of the Astronautical Society of India on "21st Century Challenges in Space -- Indian Context."

Photobucket

If you like to use this tool, First register free account via Bhuvan official website. After user login to get to use Indian 3D Mapping Tool. It is similar to Google Earth. The Bhuvan web portal that allowed all to zoom into specific area of interest at high resolution.

Further Info Check Out Bhuvan ISRO Official Website: www.bhuvan.nrsc.gov.in

Friday, July 31, 2009

SQLMAP 0.7 Released – Automatic SQL Injection Tool

We’ve been following sqlmap since it first came out in Feburary 2007 and it’s been quite some time since the last update sqlmap 0.6.3 in December 2008.

For those not familiar with the tool, sqlmap is an open source command-line automatic SQL injection tool. Its goal is to detect and take advantage of SQL injection vulnerabilities in web applications.

Once it detects one or more SQL injections on the target host, the user can choose among a variety of options to perform an extensive back-end database management system fingerprint, retrieve DBMS session user and database, enumerate users, password hashes, privileges, databases, dump entire or user’s specified DBMS tables/columns, run his own SQL statement, read or write either text or binary files on the file system, execute arbitrary commands on the operating system, establish an out-of-band stateful connection between the attacker box and the database server via Metasploit payload stager, database stored procedure buffer overflow exploitation or SMB relay attack and more.

Recent Changes

Along all the takeover features introduced in sqlmap 0.7 release candidate 1, some of the new features include:

  • Adapted Metasploit wrapping functions to work with latest 3.3 development version too.
  • Adjusted code to make sqlmap 0.7 to work again on Mac OSX too.
  • Reset takeover OOB features (if any of –os-pwn, –os-smbrelay or –os-bof is selected) when running under Windows because msfconsole and msfcli are not supported on the native Windows Ruby interpreter.
  • This make sqlmap 0.7 to work again on Windows too.
  • Minor improvement so that sqlmap tests also all parameters with no value (eg. par=).
  • HTTPS requests over HTTP proxy now work on either Python 2.4, 2.5 and 2.6+.

For a complete list of changes view the ChangeLog.

The manual is available here – README.pdf [PDF]

You can download sqlmap 0.7 here:

Linux Source: sqlmap-0.7.tar.gz
Windows Portable: sqlmap-0.7_exe.zip

Friday, July 24, 2009

A Virus Program to Disable USB Ports



Virus to disable USB portsIn this post we will show how to create a simple virus that disables/blocks the USB ports on the computer (PC). C programming language used create this virus. Anyone with a basic knowledge of C language should be able to understand the working of this virus program.

Once this virus is executed it will immediately disable all the USB ports on the computer. As a result the you’ll will not be able to use your pen drive or any other USB peripheral on the computer. The source code for this virus is available for download. You can test this virus on your own computer without any worries since wehave also given a program to re-enable all the USB ports.

1. Download the USB_Block.rar file on to your computer.

2. It contains the following 4 files.

  • block_usb.c (source code)
  • unblock_usb.c (source code)

3. You need to compile them before you can run it. A step-by-step procedure to compile C programs is given in my post - How to Compile C Programs.

3. Upon compilation of block_usb.c you get block_usb.exe which is a simple virus that will block (disable) all the USB ports on the computer upon execution (double click).

4. To test this virus, just run the block_usb.exe file and insert a USB pen drive (thumb drive). Now you can see that your pen drive will never get detected. To re-enable the USB ports just run the unblock_usb.exe (you need to compile unblock_usb.c) file. Now insert the pen drive and it should get detected.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Latest Proxies for Free Airtel GPRS

I have got a lot of comments that the settings for free Airtel GPRS that I had posted earlier doesn’t work. So I have found out another hack to get free GPRS on Airtel. The following settings have been tested in different States and are found to be successfully working on most of them.

I have got 2 settings which you can tryout to see if any of them works for you.

First
IP Address :: 10.49.16.10
Port :: 8877
APN :: airtelfun.com

Second
IP Address :: 200.199.82.61
Port :: 8080
APN :: airtelmms.com

second one works in some states only

I have also got some IP Addresses and Open Ports which are working for different Users so I have listed them. You can tryout if the above settings doesn’t work.

Working IP Addresses
(a) 10.2.45.155
(b) 10.49.16.10
(c) 10.4.1.55
(d) 10.6.6.6
(e) 10.89.15.15
(f) 100.1.200.467
(g) 100.1.200.211 (this one is for west bengal)

Ports
(a) 8080
(b) 9421
(c) 9201

Thursday, July 9, 2009

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Domain Hijacking – How to Hijack Domain Names

In this post We will tell you about how the domain names are hacked and how they can be protected. The act of hacking domain names is commonly known as Domain Hijacking. For most of you, the term “domain hijacking” may seem to be like an alien. So let me first tell you what domain hijacking is all about.

Domain hijacking is a process by which Internet Domain Names are stolen from it’s legitimate owners. Domain hijacking is also known as domain theft. Before we can proceed to know how to hijack domain names, it is necessary to understand how the domain names operate and how they get associated with a particular web server (website).

The operation of domain name is as follows

Any website say for example gohacking.com consists of two parts. The domain name (gohacking.com) and the web hosting server where the files of the website are actually hosted. In reality, the domain name and the web hosting server (web server) are two different parts and hence they must be integrated before a website can operate successfully. The integration of domain name with the web hosting server is done as follows.

1. After registering a new domain name, we get a control panel where in we can have a full control of the domain.

2. From this domain control panel, we point our domain name to the web server where the website’s files are actually hosted.

For a clear understanding let me take up a small example.

John registers a new domain “abc.com” from an X domain registration company. He also purchases a hosting plan from Y hosting company. He uploads all of his files (.html, .php, javascripts etc.) to his web server (at Y). From the domain control panel (of X) he configures his domain name “abc.com” to point to his web server (of Y). Now whenever an Internet user types “abc.com”, the domain name “abc.com” is resolved to the target web server and the web page is displayed. This is how a website actually works.

What happens when a domain is hijacked

Now let’s see what happens when a domain name is hijacked. To hijack a domain name you just need to get access to the domain control panel and point the domain name to some other web server other than the original one. So to hijack a domain you need not gain access to the target web server.

For example, a hacker gets access to the domain control panel of “abc.com”. From here the hacker re-configures the domain name to point it to some other web server (Z). Now whenever an Internet user tries to access “abc.com” he is taken to the hacker’s website (Z) and not to John’s original site (Y).

In this case the John’s domain name (abc.com) is said to be hijacked.

How to hijack a domain name

To hijack a domain name, you need to gain access to the domain control panel of the target domain. For this you need the following ingredients

1. The domain registrar name for the target domain.

2. The administrative email address associated with the target domain.

You can get these information by accessing the WHOIS data of the target domain. To get access the WHOIS data, goto whois.domaintools.com, enter the target domain name and click on Lookup. Once the whois data is loaded, scroll down and you’ll see Whois Record. Under this you’ll get the “Administrative contact email address”.

To get the domain registrar name, look for something like this under the Whois Record. “Registration Service Provided By: XYZ Company”. Here XYZ Company is the domain registrar. In case if you don’t find this, then scroll up and you’ll see ICANN Registrar under the “Registry Data”. In this case, the ICANN registrar is the actual domain registrar.

The administrative email address associated with the domain is the backdoor to hack the domain name. It is the key to unlock the domain control panel. So you need to hack this email account and take full control of it. Email hacking has been discussed in my previous post how to hack an email account.

Once you take full control of this email account, you need to visit the domain registrar’s website and click on forgot password in the login page. You will be asked to enter either the domain name or the administrative email address to initiate the password reset process. once you do this all the details to reset the password will be sent to the administrative email address. Since you already have access to this email account you can easily reset the password of domain control panel. After resetting the password, login to the control panel with your new password and from there you can hijack the domain within minutes.

How to protect the domain name from being hijacked

The best way to protect the domain name is to protect the administrative email account associated with the domain. If you loose this email account, you loose your domain. So refer my previous post on how to protect your email account from being hacked. Another best way to protect your domain is to go for private domain registration. When you register a domain name using the private registration option, all your personal details such as your name, address, phone and administrative email address are hidden from the public. So when a hacker performs a WHOIS lookup for you domain name, he will not be able to find your name, phone and administrative email address. So the private registration provides an extra security and protects your privacy. Private domain registration costs a bit extra amount but is really worth for it’s advantages. Every domain registrar provides an option to go for private registration, so when you purchase a new domain make sure that you select the private registration option.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Create One-Click Shutdown and Reboot Shortcuts

This is really very easy one but very effective one. Enjoy it!

First, create a shortcut on your desktop by right-clicking on the desktop, choosing New, and then choosing Shortcut. The Create Shortcut Wizard appears. In the box asking for the location of the shortcut, type shutdown. After you create the shortcut, double-clicking on it will shut down your PC.

But you can do much more with a shutdown shortcut than merely shut down your PC. You can add any combination of several switches to do extra duty, like this:

shutdown -r -t 01 -c “Rebooting your PC”
Double-clicking on that shortcut will reboot your PC after a one-second delay and display the message “Rebooting your PC.” The shutdown command includes a variety of switches you can use to customize it.

I use this technique to create two shutdown shortcuts on my desktop—one for turning off my PC, and one for rebooting. Here are the ones I use:

shutdown -s -t 03 -c “Bye Bye m8!”
shutdown -r -t 03 -c “I ll be back m8 ;) !”

Switch
What it does

-s
Shuts down the PC.

-l
Logs off the current user.

-t nn
Indicates the duration of delay, in seconds, before performing the action.

-c “messagetext”
Displays a message in the System Shutdown window. A maximum of 127 characters can be used. The message must be enclosed in quotation marks.

-f
Forces any running applications to shut down.

-r
Reboots the PC.

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