Agape Blog

Agape Inc is now worlds first Cyber Forensic Company to comply with 9001:2008 Standards.
Agape received ISO 9001:2000 certification on 2 May 2008, and transition to 9001: 2008 was achieved on 29 Dec 2008.

ISO 9001 is a quality management standard. It applies to all types
of organizations. It can help both product and service oriented organizations achieve
standards of quality that are recognized and respected throughout the world.

The ISO 9000 family addresses “quality management”. This means Agape fulfills:
• the customer’s quality requirements, and
• applicable regulatory requirements, while aiming to
• enhance customer satisfaction, and
• achieve continual improvement of its performance in pursuit of these objectives.

The image given below shows our certificate.

Once again Microsoft got defaced by means of SQL Injection. Few days ago a defacer known as Agd_Scorp defaced 6 Microsoft websites. Few years ago, Microsoft was the target of the attacks mostly because defacers liked Linux more. Now it is just “for fame”. Also in this case defacer didn’t leave any message.

Recently a group of hackers named as PENTAGUARD had cracked into the government sites of Australia, America and England all at a time. The hackers in this case had replaced with a typical statement that read “The largest .gov & .mil mass defacement in the history of mankind”.

Defacement means the web content hosted on a server has been modified illegally. It need not indicate a full system compromise and is less damaging than cracking, which means the attacker may have access to other files in the system Indian Cyberspace is under tremendous threat of cyber hackers and cyber criminals. As per Computer Emergency Response Team India (CERT-In), which is a referral agency to report computer security incidents in the country, a total of 612 Indian websites have been defaced during March 2008. Commercial sector site are more prone to defacing (85% of total site defacement)in India than government sites.

In the recent past, it is blamed that hackers from India’s two neighboring countries have tried to deface the sites of our government agencies, which are having vital and sensitive security information. In the month of March 2008, 57 security incidents were reported to CERT-In from various national and international agencies. Intelligence agencies of India have taken the incidents very seriously and it was reported that the agencies met government officials and ministers on May 13, 2008, to discuss the issue of hacking of sensitive sites.

From 1950 when IBM had a monopoly in India to 2007 India is continuously on the rise. The country has seen an era when after the IBM shuttled its shop in India in 1950, to 1991 when India developed its first powerful parallel computer till present.

India’s IT industry has grown up to US $ 5.7 billion (including over $4 billion worth of software exports) in 1999-2000, with the annual growth rate not sliding below 50 percent since 1991. It exports software and services to nearly 95 countries around the world. The share of North America (U.S. & Canada) in India’s software exports is about 61 per cent, but every coin has two sides.

As per the data available in ‘Crime in 2007′ report published by the NCRB, the number of cyber crimes registered under the IT Act in 2007 was 217, as against 142 in 2006, an increase of 52.8 per cent. 45.6% (99 cases) of the total 217 cases registered under IT Act 2000 were related to obscene publication / transmission in electronic form, normally known as cyber pornography.
According to NCRB various cyber crime cases registered under IPC section 339 during 2007 as compare to 311 cases during 2006

A total of 429 persons were arrested in the country for Cyber Crimes under IPC during 2007. According to ‘Crime 2007′, 63 per cent of the offenders were in the age group 18–30 years (97 out of 154) and 29.9 per cent of the offenders were in the age group 30–45 years (46 out of 154).

The contemporary IT act needs to be further restructured to a halt in the growing trends in cyber forensic.

It should be projected that those occupied in the rebellious side of asymmetric warfare would be profoundly contingent on existing and widely deployed communications tools.

As the expertise gulf between what you can organize yourself and what large corporations with access to capital markets can field one would expect those systems to be co-opted for every conceivable purpose.

Technology is intimately connected to power, both used as a force for the powerful as well as a mechanism for the redistribution of power. While I individually believe peaceful remonstration and social defiance are the preferable ways to speak truth to power that won’t listen, crowd sourced intellect, and surveillance techniques indisputably are and certainly will be used by those with vicious agendas as well.

It’s worth reflecting in these conditions that, more oppressive regulatory regimes will not prevent the use of our technological tools against us, that the long term solutions to problems like this will not involve more regulation or the use of force of arms but rather the construction of political and economic frameworks that include a voice for those who are presently marginalized and therefore seek to make their point via violence and destruction.

Continuity of knowledge and society does have merit. However, there are times when this view of technology must be discarded, because it can be terribly wrong and lead us to a primary misunderstanding of the potential significance of technology in social, political and economic change. However technological change isn’t success but rather a troubling matter. Therefore it is rightly said, ‘A fool having a sophisticated tool is still a fool’. Ultimately it depends on the psychology of an individual on how he uses this man made technology i.e. for construction or destruction…..

Sherwin Azavedo
Manager: Cyber Crime Complaint

TOLL FREE NO: 1800-209-6789 (To complain Cyber Crime Online)

Credit card holders are always cautious while using their credit card. The owner lacks control over transaction which weakens his accountability. Fraud involving credit card transaction is the resultant of these limitations. It is increasing day by day as the market of e-commerce expands. Credit Card holder strongly denies many transactions due to his weak answerable position in comparison to banks and payment gateways. In the present scenario all the security techniques are implemented only in network level or authentication between the bankers and payment gateways. Due to these limitations banks face severe problem in credit card dispute. There are thousands of cases reported and pending in court against different banks in India. The bank dispute and grievance department accepts that more than 76 percent of card holder denies transaction and claims fraud against the bank.

Fig: Credit card fraud reported in Fraud Management Services

In Agape’s Fraud Management Services department, there are about thousands of cases reported on credit card fraud during transaction. Among these cases, about 68 percent of the cases are those in which clients are claiming that they have not used their card at all or used without their consent. The rest of cases are payment gateway dispute and refund of money.
There is a need to think and develop new strategic security techniques which will provide strong authentication and full control to the user during the credit card transaction. Users feel equivalent to the wallet transaction and liable to their own risk. The user should authenticate or provide permission before transaction. This will create a layer of trust with banks and promote secure e-commerce.

Author: Prabhat Tiwari
Manager-Fraud Management Services

Last month’s attacks have provided the first, tragic, test of who were right about the net, encryption and terrorism. Innumerous number of terrorist attacks is coming to life lately and is posing a threat to the security of the nation at large. These militants are not oldies who lacked the knowledge and capabilities of the web, but they are now one of the hi-techies who are highly skilled & understand the potential power & creativity of the internet a.k.a CYBER WORLD.

The terrorists who wreaked mayhem in a city like Mumbai for over 60 hours last week were juvenile, proficiently trained and armed to the teeth. Their gadgets included satellite phones, mobile phones with Internet connectivity and global positioning system equipment. In India, one of the main drawbacks for long last crime suffering is the inability or you can say the incapacity or know how to cope with the growing technology around us. Leave alone the common man; the police even are not well equipped & trained with the necessary sophisticated tools to fight terrorism. Carrying a simple mobile phone with outdated weapons, when their adversary armed with the latest piece of equipment that technology provides on the loose & also a mobile system with inbuilt GPS tracking system to monitor each and every action happening around them. This kind of slackness creates security loopholes which endangers the life of every individual.

The ultimate solution is to deploy “e-intelligence management system” to cut off the security crisis & economic loss and threat to life these act brings which indirectly causes instability & mental distress among the people. Agape’s e-intelligence management solutions are providing cutting edge tools and techniques to monitor the transmission of digital data. After initializing the necessary security measures, these types of threats will not go undetected and there will be an environment of faith & trust in countries like India.

Author: Sherwin Azavedo
Manager: Cyber Crime Complaint

The current crisis and the subsequent meltdown have been the subject of much discussion in recent past. The magnitude of the crisis, the impact it has had on what we thought were ripple effect across the globe have been mind boggling. We discuss on this article about the inertia of economic crisis particularly in the financial industry on the employees of various companies.
It has been observed that employee perpetrated fraud will grow as the recession increases. Internal fraud increases due to psychological impact of the economic recession. The incidence of large unemployment causes feeling of disassociation which leads to do for personal gain. Internal fraud based on our work with financial institutions is highly correlated with several things. a) length of employee hire (which is primarily due to their sense of loyalty to an organization. As employees feel less loyal to a company the rate of fraud increases. In an institution with higher turnover, the rate of internal fraud increase. b) the degree to which the employee has access to credit - if any employee has less access to credit, they are likely to steal personal information from the customer base and attempt to use it for their own gain, c) the time of year - employee fraud increases around holidays. This occurs because employees are less well managed and because they begin to commit fraud to support the spending associated with holiday shopping increases. d) collusion- the rate to which employees are recruited (knowingly or unknowingly to help an outsider bypass internal controls). In times of economic difficulty the rate of recruitment and collusion increases.
Fraud within the companies by the employee will increase over the next few months. This is because as we see it, the absolute rate of fraud is increasing, and employees are increasingly being targeted by outsiders to help bypass internal controls in a tightening credit environment.

In credit cards, we believe that internal fraud accounts for up to 3% of recognized losses, and in mortgage fraud we believe that number can be much higher (10% or more).

Author: Prabhat Tiwari
Manager: Fraud Management Services.

Location Tracking & Remote Data Destruction

Few laptop manufacturing companies are providing the PC Trace software’s, a location tracking program residing in your computer, determines the location of your computer and sends you location information via email. The PC Trace software provides accurate tracking results including the laptop’s public and private IP addresses, as well as hostnames. The tracking results enable identification of the thief’s name, phone number and address, in addition to the physical location of the stolen laptop.

The PC Trace software determines the location of the laptop by analyzing its network configuration information, including the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and hostname. This technology provides an accurate, pinpoint location anywhere in the world, and the results are sent to you automatically, with no monitoring whatsoever, to protect your privacy.

In addition, it also allows you to remotely destroy sensitive data in the event your laptop is lost or stolen. When a laptop is stolen, the data must be verifiably destroyed to protect data and reduce corporate liability related to data breaches.

During the remote data destruction process, The PC Trace software’s destroys only the area of the disk drive that Windows reserves for storing user data, including but not limited to user documents, emails, temporary files, Internet cache, cookies, photos, chat history, music, application settings and so on. The PC Trace software does not destroy operating systems or programs, so that the thief can continue to use the stolen laptop until his/her arrest.

The PC Trace software’s for Laptops provides:

• Global Location Tracking
• Remote Data Destruction

Benefits:

· Protect data - Destroy sensitive data and trade secrets in case your laptop is stolen

· Reduce corporate liabilities – Minimize the corporate liabilities associated with data breaches

· Reduce internal theft - Reduce theft caused by “inside jobs”

· Protect hardware assets – Know the exact location of your laptops.

Author:  Mrinal Rawat

Executive: Fraud Management Services.

As the mobile phone become inevitable in every business process and makes the life easier. It is considered that use of mobile phone increases transparency and accountability as well as maximizes the business profit also. The versatile function of mobile phone makes it very popular in every age group. In the present scenario mobile phone become identity of person. Mobile phones the only thing that is common to every single criminal from a petty thief to a king-pin who specialises in kidnapping industrialists. The latest challenge in front of police intelligence department is to track down a mobile phone. “If some body is calling from a land-line, it is a matter of a few seconds for us to track down the caller. But it becomes difficult when the same call is made from a mobile phone,” said a senior official of the city police special branch. (Time of India, 23.2.08)….read more

Author: Prabhat Tiwari
Manager: Fraud Management Services