Agape Blog

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has raised concerns over the growing cyber crimes in US that cost tens of millions of dollars and also posing as a serious threat to US security. The FBI cyber division pointed out activities like computer spying and personal information theft as something that needs immediate measures to be curbed.

The U.S. intelligence agencies have earlier pointed fingers on Russia and China as being the two nations that have the abilities to electronic spying by breaking through U.S. computer networks. Apart from these, FBI has narrowed down 24 more countries that pose a threat to the US. Without naming the 24 countries,FBI has made this statement: “There are countries who have an interest in obtaining information from the U.S., in terms of the electronic theft of data.”

The US computer networks are being constantly attacted by Botnets by sending spam e-mails and spreading malicious code. Thus the U.S. federal agents are stepping up efforts to fight computer crime. They are also joining hands with some foreign counterparts to deal this serious issue. It is worth noting that in January this year, U.S. President George Bush had launched an effort called the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, to address the issue of comouter crimes.

Informative articles always help everyone as they result in knowledge addition. Keeping the same thought in mind, the links this week point to some very informative articles, which will surely help you.

1. Computers are now weapons used to steal people’s identity, defraud companies of trade secrets, or prey on children online. Such cyber threats must be tackled in a proper way. Read more
2. Your hard drive got corrupted and you fear the possibility of losing your important data. Heres when data recovery can help you. Michael Stankard explains how hard drives work, why they fail and what you as users can do to protect your data. Read more
3. A new research center will study ways to improve personal identification management on the Internet to combat identity theft and fraud, narcotics and cyber terrorism. Read more

This week has been very busy so far as we have been working hard for the release of our new mobile forensics product. This product will help the forensic investigators as it would be available in different versions.

Anyways, this week we are presenting the links which will provide helpful information about the importance of information security and the new updates to the rules. We hope they would be helpful for everyone.

1. Are You Familiar With the New E-Discovery Rules? Read more
2. 6 burning questions about network security. Read more
3. With so many ways for people to conduct their lives on the internet, their personal information ends up online. Safeguarding yourself against cyber threats becomes necessary. Read more

Tips + Case Study + Valuable Information @ computer forensics. That’s what the links for today are all about.

1. Ray Weikal feels criminals are increasingly using the P2P and FTP file sharing protocols for executing their tasks. He discusses the road to cyber safety. Read more

2. Why is FBI stumped after recovering a secret audiotape? Read more

3. Technology is changing and so are the crimes related to it. This increases the need for the computer forensic experts, but what are their responsibilities? Read more

The National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA) has provided a section titled- “Top Alerts” on their website. The objective for the same is to make people aware of the various threats which can make anyone vulnerable to attacks from cyber criminals.

Here’s a screenshot of that section:

More details on various threats can be found at - http://www.ncfta.net/alerts.asp

The University of Alabama at Birmingham is warning computer users of a new spam scam! E-mail is vastly used to stay connected with other people by sharing information and this has been the target of spammers since a long time. Of course, forensic experts  helped in nabbing many cyber space criminals. But as forensic science is advancing, so are the spammers.

They create emails that look normal, but instead of taking you to the body of the email, it takes you to the malware. These are not phishing emails, which ask for your bank account or credit card details, etc. These are of a different type referred as “drive-by infectors”. Usually, the links provided in the email open a pop up which will tell you that your computer is infected. To help you out, it will take you to an anti-virus website, which is deceiving and instead takes you to a malware.

The latest exploitable target for the spammers is - Media. And the latest example is CNN being targeted by spammers. Basically spammers have cloned the news alert the same way that we get breaking news from CNN.

Forensic experts suggest that if you do not trust any email, the easiest way to double check is to log on to the source website mentioned in the email. Also, you should be on the lookout for suspicious emails cluttering your inbox.