In yet another move that appears to be aimed towards internet censorship in Pakistan, a government department has called for proposals for the development, deployment and operation of a national level URL Filtering and Blocking System.

The ad had been placed in local papers by National ICT R&D Fund, a division of the Ministry of Information Technology, on February 22, 2012. The proposal request states that each box of the system “should be able to handle a block list of up to 50 million URLs with a processing delay of not more than 1 millisecond.”

The filtering and blocking system will function as a firewall for the entire country and will have the potential to block the access of any specific URL throughout the country.

According to the Request for Proposal available on the ICT R&D Fund website, the system should be capable of filtering and blocking URLs from the domain level to sub-folder, file levels and also specific file types. Additionally, the system should have the ability to block a single IP or a range of IPs.

The proposal states that the solution should be able to handle 85Gbps of bandwidth and should have growth scalability of around 40% to 50% every year.

The government has recently cracked down on content that is deemed offensive, blocking up to over 13,000 pornographic websites and was also considering certain words in SMSs.

Source: http://tribune.com.pk

SOPA has been delayed, for now. The House has agreed to revisit the issue next month, but they now know the White House will veto any bill that’s not more narrowly focused.

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Lords created a sensation; many rushed to club India with China as a cyber delinquent. ‘Forbes’ said the claims, if proved, were historic, as they would provide the first documented case of state-sponsored cyber espionage.
Several inconsistencies immediately surfaced, casting doubt on the claims. There are ten Indian security agencies with the power to launch technical surveillance. Military Intelligence is not one of them. The hackers also said they found Symantec source code in Indian government servers and made it public with much fanfare; the code turned out to be half-a-decade old, of only vintage value to any self-respecting hacker.
Security publication ‘Infosec’ published an interview with YamaTough, a spokesman of the Lords, who rambles through mutilated words. He says Lords attacked Indian government to force a pro-US tilt in the government!
Yama has a low opinion of Indian officials; after getting hacked they just traced the infected machines and changed passwords, which, however, continue to host the keylogging software inserted by hackers. According to him, Indian officials forward sensitive information to their free Yahoo mails for backups.  Not exactly the nerdy kind running a sophisticated cyber espionage operation, as alleged earlier. If he is right, their incompetence may be their best defence.
FBI is probing the surveillance charge on the US officials; but the Lords’ credibility is eroding. More than serving any patriotic cause, it is clear that hackers were trying to embarrass India.
There is a good chance that they are not even Indian. Though it is hard to say where they come from, there are some leads. The Twitter profile picture of the Lords initially had a Tibetan rendering of the Indian God of Death. The MI memo is a likely but an excellent fake, which mimics the torturous language used by Indian babus. Hackers are not known for their love of English language and the fabrication of the memo suggests the involvement of larger, possibly other government agencies, hostile to the growing Indian and US relationship. The mystery is slowly unravelling and it is no longer India’s Wikileak moment as it was initially thought to be.

Source Tech Blog

Carberp replaces any Facebook page the user navigates to with a fake page notifying the victim that his/her Facebook account is ‘temporarily locked,’" says Trusteer CTO Amit Klein in his blog. "The page asks the user for their first name, last name, email, date of birth, password and a Ukash 20 euro [approximately $25 US] voucher number to ‘confirm verification’ of their identity and unlock the account.

"The page claims the cash voucher will be ‘added to the user’s main Facebook account balance,’ which is obviously not the case," Klein states. "Instead, the voucher number is transferred to the Carberp bot master, who presumably uses it as a cash equivalent, thus effectively defrauding the user of $25."

The emerging man-in-the-browser (MitB) attack exploits the trust users have in Facebook and the anonymity of Ukash e-cash vouchers, Klein writes. "Unlike attacks against online banking applications that require transferring money to another account — which creates an auditable trail — this new Carberp attack allows fraudsters to use or sell the e-cash vouchers immediately, anywhere they are accepted on the Internet.

Read full article here

System Requirements

• This utility works on any version of Windows, starting from Windows 2000 and up to Windows 7, including 64-bit systems.
• One of the following capture drivers is required to use WebCookiesSniffer:
  • WinPcap Capture Driver: WinPcap is an open source capture driver that allows you to capture network packets on any version of Windows. You can download and install the WinPcap driver from this Web page.
  • Microsoft Network Monitor Driver version 2.x (Only for Windows 2000/XP/2003): Microsoft provides a free capture driver under Windows 2000/XP/2003 that can be used by WebCookiesSniffer, but this driver is not installed by default, and you have to manually install it, by using one of the following options:
    • Option 1: Install it from the CD-ROM of Windows 2000/XP according to the instructions in Microsoft Web site
    • Option 2 (XP Only) : Download and install the Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools. One of the tools in this package is netcap.exe. When you run this tool in the first time, the Network Monitor Driver will automatically be installed on your system.
  • Microsoft Network Monitor Driver version 3.x: Microsoft provides a new version of Microsoft Network Monitor driver (3.x) that is also supported under Windows 7/Vista/2008.
    The new version of Microsoft Network Monitor (3.x) is available to download from Microsoft Web site.
• You can also try to use WebCookiesSniffer without installing any driver, by using the ‘Raw Sackets’ method. Unfortunately, Raw Sackets method has many problems:
  • It doesn’t work in all Windows systems, depending on Windows version, service pack, and the updates installed on your system.
  • On Windows 7 with UAC turned on, ‘Raw Sackets’ method only works when you run WebCookiesSniffer with ‘Run As Administrator’.

Known Limitations

• WebCookiesSniffer cannot capture files of a secured Web site (HTTPS)