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Thursday, May 21, 2015

How To Capture Someone’s Picture Who Tries To Unlock Your Phone

Some things are better if kept private. I have seen many people hating it like anything when their friends or family members try to unlock their smartphone without their permission. And sometimes due to lots of successive incorrect attempts, the phone gets hard-locked – that means the only way to unlock your phone is via your email. This is enough to irritate a person. Also, you can not do anything about it because you don’t know whom to yell at.

Today, I am going to tell how you can capture a photo of that intruder who tries to unlock your phone without your permission. The only thing you have to do is to download and install this free Android app called Hidden Eye. Hidden Eye once installed will capture a photo of the intruder each time he/she tries to unlock your device.

How Hidden Eye Works?

It’s very simple to use the Hidden Eye app: just open it and tap on the OFF button which is located at middle and then tap to ACTIVATE it. Now tick the options on which you want to get alerted, and this is it.

Hidden Eye app work on a very simple idea- each time intruder tries to unlock your device, it will capture an image of him/her which you can see by tapping on View Intrusions. You can also see the date and the timing below the image captured by app.

hidden-eye-on

If you have turned on the first option, your phone will ring after 3 attempts with the default ringtone. With enabling the second option, you will get to see the intrusion in notification bar. And if you enabled the third option, you will get to see the intruder’s image at the time of unlocking your phone.


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Anonymous Hijacks Thousands of Insecure Routers to Power Its DDoS Tools

anonymous-hacks-routers

Lack of some elementary security measures can risk your router’s security and this has stemmed to grow into a large-scale denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks using these hacker-controlled routers. A web security firm Incapsula has discovered a new router based botnet Mr Black while investigating some DDoS attacks against its customers since this December.
 
Hackers exploited routers’ negligent security measures to launch these attacks all over the world. According to this report published by the security firm, the routers made by Ubiquiti Networks had DDoS malware installed on them.

The routers were not hacked due to some vulnerability in the hardware. Instead, it happened because of the deployment of the router in an insecure manner that exposed their management interfaces using the default credentials over SSH and HTTP.

The routers that were inspected were found to have 4 versions of Mr Black, a DDoS program and altogether thirty-seven variations of Mr Black were detected. Other DDoS programs included DoFloo, Mayday and Skynet (a remote sensing tool).

In some earlier versions of the report, Incapsula said that it believed that the hacktivist group Anonymous was one of the few groups those used the compromised routers. It is yet not clear that why Anonymous was highlighted in the report, but it is certain that few people who call themselves “Anonymous” were using the routers. The original article on the Daily Dot was edited to remove the fact that botnet directs to irc (dot) anonops (dot) com.

Total 40,269 different IP addresses were detected from 1,600 ISPs spread across 109 countries. The main affected countries were Thailand (64%), Brazil (21%), United States (4%) and India (3%). To control these routers, 60 servers were hacked and majority of these were in China and the U.S.



To save themselves from the DDoS attacks, users must make sure that their routers’ management interfaces aren’t exposed over HTTP or SSH to the internet. They can also use some tools available to scan their router’s IP for open ports and change their default login credentials.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Know How Easy It Is To Lose Your Important Data From SSD

solid-state-drive-ssd

According to a new research in the data storage field, new solid-state drives are prone to data leakage over time. These hard drives are faster and have more storage size but all of them have a major flaw associated with its basic property, that it will eventually lose its data if it is not powered regularly or for few days.
A solid state drive (SSD) (also known as a solid-state disk though it contains no actual disk nor a drive motor to spin a disk) is a data storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently. We all know SSD’s qualities over regular hard drives and we normally think that it will last forever even if we smash it with hammer or pour acid on it.
The basic reason behind this flaw is the non-regulated and unmaintained temperature. The real problem is the time after which it will lose data. For different scenarios the time taken is also different – it can take months, or sometimes few days and then it’s gone.
Nobody needs the details on how important your stored data can be sometimes. Think as it is a legal evidence and it will go after two years in court as in India (blame the slow India judicial system) and suddenly you noticed that all data is gone or think of an instance suddenly all of your Facebook images are gone simply because Facebook stored it in SSD and forgot about it. But, it will not happen as Facebook have their separate cold storage facilities to outrun this problem.



A recent presentation is given by Alvin cox, Seagate’s engineer at Joint Electron Device Engineering Council seminar. He warned that the period of time data is retained on some solid-state drives is halved for every 9°F (or 5°C) rise in temperature where it’s stored. It means that if the solid state drive is at normal room temperature which is 25°C then it’s okay but if the temperature goes somewhat 5°C high, then half of your data will be gone.
Now all the guys living in desert areas might be thinking that why they still have their data safe. You don’t lose your data that easily if you are regularly giving power to it or maintaining the temperature by using it. Or, you are using some high-end SSD, which we all are using in our MacBooks or gaming laptops then it will have around two-year life span. So, for two years, your data will be safe even if you change the temperature or not.
But enterprise solid state drives are the most affected ones. These drives are having the data loss problem pretty severely. So for the companies who value their data or work on their stored data, it’s a big problem. The one and only reasonable solution to this is to make its copy on mechanical disk. Or else you might lose your data without knowing about it.