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Monday, December 29, 2008

Mr.Ankit Fadia's lecture on Ethical Hacking (22 Dec 2008)


Our technologically networked world is continuously challenged by new security loopholes, threats and attacks. With a growth in computer users and networks, the scale and sophistication of cyber crime has increased thus creating a high demand for ethical hackers. The demand for computer security professionals is estimated to grow to over 77,000 in India and 188,000 worldwide.

For the purpose of addressing this issue, our college Sri Shakthi Institute of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore invited an alarming personality, Mr.Ankit Fadia a widely recognized computer security guru and cyber anti-terrorism expert. Mr.Ankit Fadia lives in USA where he is pursuing his Bachelors in Computer science with specialization in information security from Stanford University, California, USA.
The function began with welcome address by our Principal Dr.V.Murugesan followed by the presidential address by our honorable chairman Dr.S.Thangavelu.
Mr.Ankit Fadia started speaking about the various aspects of security & its vulnerability. But was very categorical in differentiating a hacker and a cracker. Generally from the people's perspective there is a misconception that cracker and Hacker is one and the same. But after his lecture we were able to differentiate that a Cracker is one who causes ill effects to the society and violates the law whereas the hacker protects the society from the cracker and abides to the law.
He had explained the different type of attacks such as privacy attacks, dos attacks and many more that could attack Computer.
We were spellbound after hearing that a 11yr old boy from Russia was successful in cracking the NASA's entire computer system and changed the direction of a spacecraft, resulting in great loss of money to NASA.
With few case studies he explained how a cracker could access computer without one's knowledge. Then he gave a practical demonstration of how a cracker could take control over a system located anywhere in the world using TROJANS that could delete the entire data in one's computer, disable any hardware component and many other things that one cant ever imagine.
He added that its possible to crack the trial software and make it full version. But as its illegal to crack software, he suggested everyone to migrate to open source software as its completely free.
Generally every organization and education institutions block certain website so that the user may not be able to access them. Mr.Ankit Fadia, being the eminent hacker gave tips on how to bye-pass them using proxy server.

Mr.Ankit Fadia also shared his experience on how he with his fellow mates helped the US government's intelligence agency in decrypting the message sent by one of the Osama Bin Laden's men in relation with September 11's attack and practically demonstrated Steganography. Steganography is a technique which is used for hiding the information or secret message inside any image, audio or a video file. This was the technique used by the terrorist to communicate with each other.
Then he spoke on phishing which is one of the important evolving threat to security. Each and every one present were astonished when Mr.Ankit Fadia found the password of a student present among the audience, within seconds. He gave tips on how to protect one's computer like installing powerful firewall, Updating antivirus software and Operating system regularly and by installing spywares. He ended the lecture by saying that its highly important that each and every individual's privacy must be respected and its also the people's responsibility to take preventive measures to be secure enough as the technology develops.

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