Advocate (Dr.) Prashant Mali's Blog

How NSA Allegedly Hacks into your Network ? The United States' National Security Agency succeeded years ago in penetrating the company's digital firewalls. An NSA division called ANT has burrowed its way into nearly all the security architecture made by the major players in the industry -- including American global market leader Cisco and its Chinese competitor Huawei, but also producers of mass-market goods, such as US computer-maker Dell. The specialists at ANT, which presumably stands for Advanced or Access Network Technology, could be described as master carpenters for the NSA's department for Tailored Access Operations (TAO). In cases where TAO's usual hacking and data-skimming methods don't suffice, ANT workers step in with their special tools, penetrating networking equipment, monitoring mobile phones and computers and diverting or even modifying data. Such "implants," as they are referred to in NSA parlance, have played a considerable role ...

Court in EU Backs 'Right to be Forgotten' European Union   Internet users now can ask Google and other search engines to remove certain sensitive information from Internet search results, Europe's highest court ruled on May 13,2014. The ruling, handed down by the  Court of Justice of the European Union , states the "operator of the search engine ... is, in certain circumstances, obliged to remove links to Web pages that are published by third parties and contain information relating to a person from the list of results displayed following a search made on the basis of that person's name." The court's ruling on the "right to be forgotten" stems from a case involving a man in Spain who argued that Google's search results disclosed details about the auction of his repossessed home over unpaid debts. "[The man] stated that the proceedings concerning him had been fully resolved for a number of years and that reference to them was now ...

DDoS Analysis for 2014 DDoS attacks are evolving in complex, dangerous ways. Companies assessing their risk and protection  should consider: • Nearly twice as many companies (60 percent) report being attacked in 2013. • Almost 92 percent of those attacked were hit repeatedly. • 57% of DDoS targets were victims of theft: funds, customer data or intellectual property. • Though attack duration is down, the number of attacks between 1–5 Gbps shot up nearly three times. • DDoS drains manpower: over half of businesses (57 percent) need 6 or more people to mitigate DDoS attacks. • Risks of $1M a day (estimated outage losses) are common: 4 in 10 companies would suffer this much or more. • DDoS is costly across the enterprise. Customer service and other public-facing areas now take as  large a hit as IT/Security. In protecting against DDoS attacks, companies must ask: What do they stand to lose if they’re hit hard? Rigorous risk, threat and cost analysis is in order.  P...