Have you ever gave a thought what will it be like, if our Gmail or Google accounts password is compromised?? For a person like me who keeps backup of all important document, research papers, links, photos (the ones you cannot keep on home computer too ) and nearly everything on the Google cloud. Most of us have no idea where and in what form my data is stored there but still I trust Google more then my personal laptop. We use so many applications like Gmail, Google docs, Picasa, Orkut but hey all share your same Google accounts password, and if that gets compromised it’ll be like tsunami for us, and with the number of hackers (including the ethical ones ) growing in this world, the probability of it becomes pretty high. People can hack using a
network level attack, or using a poor password recovery options or if you think you are too intelligent to use your vehicle name or girlfriend/boyfriend name as password, your hacker friend will not take much time to prove that you a ‘@#$#@$’.
Well coming to the point, “How to make your Gmail and Google accounts more secure”. There is no special trick or hack to do so. It’s just that Google has provided you many features and options to do so; you have to use them in right way. Here is the check list of options you should use, to insure that your google accounts is safe enough.

1.) Use a secure connection when signing in – Google uses https by default but to make sure that Google uses https always, use the
“Always use https” option in “Browser connection:” under “General” Tab in Settings of your Gmail.

This will make sure that your user credentials are passed in encrypted form which will prevent network level attacks.

2.) Change your password regularly – With ’123456′ as the most commonly used password in this world you should start using a combination of numbers,characters, and case-sensitive letters for your password and avoid dictionary words. (Even if your dear one’s name is not there in dictionary avoid using such passwords )

3.) Update your account recovery options – Make sure that your Recovery email address is correct and you are still using it. It’s
really important as I have seen a case where a person’s recovery email id was never used and expired, which was available for anyone to take. Make sure to add your mobile number as Google can send you a recovery code via SMS, which can very handy. Last recovery option is the ‘Secret Question’ which is only available if you have not signed in during past 24 hours. The answer to the security question should be hard for others to guess, so better choose a difficult secret question and make sure you yourself remember the password .

4.) Turn on 2-step verification - This option adds up one more factor of authentication (Two factor authentication) to your Google accounts. Two factor authentication implies the use of two independent means of evidence to assert an entity, rather than two iterations of the same means. Usually “Something one knows”, “something one has”, and “something one is” are useful simple summaries of three independent factors. For 2-step verification Google uses a verification code which is time specific. If you Turn on this option for your Google accounts, each time you try to login, a Google verification code will be asked(You can remember it for a computer). The next question may be how to get this verification code?? The answer is that Google provides many ways to get this verification code. You can install a mobile application to access this code, or Google can send you a SMS containing the code, and the last option is that you can print some static codes and keep then someplace accessible, like your wallet. You can turn on 2-step verification using this link “https://www.Google.com/accounts/b/0/SmsAuthConfig”. Try to subscribe to all the ways from which you can get your verification code as not all are accessible everytime. For example there may be a case where in you have subscribed to SMS as a way of accessing verification code, in this case if you forget to take your mobile somewhere you will not be able to access your google account.

5.) Keep monitoring your account details – Check the lists of websites that are authorized to access your Google account data. Go to My Account > Authorizing applications and sites. You’ll see the list of all third-party sites you’ve granted access to. If you see a website to which you think you have not granted the access, immediately revoke the access for that site. Second thing you should monitor is the ‘Last Account Activity’. At the bottom right of your page you’ll see ‘Last account activity’ with a link for details. By clicking on that link you can monitor, how many sessions are presently open with Access type, location and time of access.

Don’t forget to visit Google security tips and Gmail security checklist from Google for further information.
Reference :
Google security tips : http://www.google.com/help/security/index.html
Gmail Security Checklist : https://mail.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=checklist.cs&tab=29488
Two-Factor Aunthentication from Wikipedia

It turns out there’s a neat utility out there called Rebuild Spotlight Index 2.7 that does all the grunt work for you. Problem is, it didn’t work for me. What’s going on is actually fairly trivial, and it’s possible to simply do everything via the command line.

The metadata utilities need to run as root, so to see what your drive is up to, you’d enter something like: sudo mdutil -s /

This shows the status on the root volume.

To turn indexing on for a volume, you enter: sudo mdutil -i on /

And, to force Spotlight to rebuild its index, you simply erase the master copy of the metadata stores on the volume like this: sudo mdutil -E /

However, while I did all this, Spotlight was still not building the indexed for me.

Here’s how I solved it, using just the Terminal.

First, I wanted to see the schema file, so I printed it out using to the standard input using: sudo mdimport -X

At the bottom of the schema listing, I say a reference to a schemaLocation, and took a shot in the dark that perhaps that Spotlight’s index rebuilding needed to check data against its schema before it would start. To do that, it might need network access, if not back to the local machine. And, for good measure, I went to check the date/timestamp on the Spotlight directory using:sudo ls -la /.Spotlight*

While most of the files had the timestamp of when I tried to delete the index, not all the files had the current date and time. Additionally, the file sizes were not growing, a good indication the index was not being rebuilt.

Then, I did the following commands to ensure indexing was on, the spotlight metastore was really gone, and that I wanted it rebuilt:

sudo mdutil -i on /

rm -rf /.Spotlight*

sudo mdutil -E /

The moment I did the last command, this time the system sprung to life, the directory /.Spotlight-V100 was created, and the files inside it were growing quickly. Spotlight on the toolbar showed a progress bar, indicating the system would be done indexing in a bit.

sudo mdutil -a -i off

This tells the Spotlight manager to disable all indexing on all volumes, the command will require your administrative password to execute.

Re-enabling Spotlight in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is just as easy, just reverse the command to:

sudo mdutil -a -i on

Now Spotlight indexing will be back on and work as usual.

to be converted to HLL

Problem:(Assembly code)

sub_408138 proc near
000 push ebx
004 push esi
008 mov esi, edx
008 dec esi
008 test esi, esi
008 jl short loc_40816F
008 inc esi
loc_408142:
008 xor edx, edx
008 mov dl, [eax]
008 xor ebx, ebx
008 mov bl, cl
008 add edx, ebx
008 test edx, edx
008 jge short loc_40815B
008 mov ebx, 100h
008 sub ebx, edx
008 mov edx, ebx
008 jmp short loc_408169
loc_40815B:
008 cmp edx, 100h
008 jle short loc_408169
008 sub edx, 100h
loc_408169:
008 mov [eax], dl
008 inc eax
008 dec esi
008 jnz short loc_408142
loc_40816F:
008 pop esi
004 pop ebx
000 retn
sub_408138 endp

 

Pseudo/High Level code:
var_esi = var_edx;
var_esi -- ;

if(var_esi >=0)
var_esi++;

do
{
var_edx=0;
LOWER byte of EDX=*var_eax;  //EAX supplied from outside

var_ebx=0;
LOWER byte of EBX=LOWER byte of ECX;  //ECX supplied from outside

var_edx=var_edx+var_ebx;

if(var_edx<0)
{
var_ebx=100h;   //256
var_ebx=var_ebx-var_edx;
var_edx=var_ebx;
}
else
{
if(var_edx>100h)
var_edx=var_edx-100h;
}

*var_eax=LOWER byte of EDX
var_eax++;
}while(--var_edx!=0)

Despite of so many categories for security, two entities are always involved i.e. Asset and Threat. In all scenarios the “asset” has to be protected from the “threat”. Considering our home security, we all lock our doors before going out. Here home is  the asset and threat is the thieves. If the thief is intelligent enough he will gather all our information like at what time the home is usually vacant, how many people live there, or what kind of lock you have applied. This all information will help him to breach your home security.
Similarly in the IT security world, asset may be the data flowing through Network, data stored on a Server, or a Database and threats are the hackers. Same as thieves  the hackers first step is “Information Gathering”.
With Reference to information security we can divide security into categories like Application Security, data security, Network
Security and others. In this article we will focus more on the Basics of Application Security.
‘Wiki’ says Application security encompasses measures taken throughout the application’s life-cycle to prevent exceptions in the security policy of an application or the underlying system (vulnerabilities) through flaws in the design, development, deployment, upgrade, or maintenance of the application. In simple words it comprises the security issues involved in any type of application, including but not limited to java, PHP, C++, and python.

Application Security Trends
The world of internet is growing in tremendous way with IPv4 addresses getting depleted. With growth in number of users, sophistication in technology, the attack vectors have also increased. The graph below shows the study by SANS institute, depicting the growth in the number of attack vectors in first half of year 2010.

Thus, with the increasing sophistication and numbers, of attacks and defense techniques, it has become a cat and mouse game.

The attacks earlier focused on the Operating Systems themselves. However, with a continuous effort and improvement  on the Operating Systems, the vulnerabilities are difficult to find in them, hence resulting in the shift of the fulcrum from the Operating System to the targeted applications. The graph below shows the trend for four popular applications, i.e. Adobe reader, Ms Word, Ms Excel and Ms Power point. If you look at the Adobe, you will see that the vulnerabilities increased drastically for year 2010.

So, it can be said that the two sides of the application security, both good and bad, are in a constant state of evolution.

The malicious guy comes in: THE HACKER
There might be some guys with the malicious intent, who might be looking to compromise your assets. They might be technology geeks, freaks and motivated hackers, attacking your applications just for fun, or for profit. Many times, they are also funded by high profile companies or even governments to target the sensitive data and assets of companies or countries they are in competition. Well known Stuxnet worm and the Aurora attacks are just a few examples; of this; however, there might be many attacks that go unnoticed by the governments and the organizations.

These attackers try to gather as much information as possible for the target. This will involve a lot of searching on the search engines, news groups, job sites, your own site, public forums, social networks like facebook, myspace, orkut etc. A lot of information can be harvested in this manner which can be later misused to breach security. This information includes email ids, date of birth, likings and disliking, girl friends and boyfriends, the software used in the company, location and much more. A popular quote in the hacking world says “Deterministic hackers spend 90% of their time in information gathering phase, rest 10% is spent on the breach”.
Knowing the threats: Build your walls strong enough
The assets need to be secured from the threats. However, for securing the assets, there needs to be a proper knowledge on the boundaries of the application from which input comes. In other simple words, the first rule of security is “the user input MUST not be trusted”. So, for securing the application, the application castle should be strong enough to stop the malicious input on the walls itself. This approach is called as input validation. The other approach is that even if the enemy enters the castle, don’t let them go away, or cripple them. This approach is termed as output validation. These threats can come from any input, which may include a form field, url, cookies, post parameters etc. These inputs should not be trusted in any manner, as this “trust” is what leads to the compromise.

Deeply understanding the threats: Ohh… they are so many
The attack techniques have evolved over time, and there are many ways in which the applications can be compromised. The attacks can be following but not limited to:
•    Cross site scripting
•    SQL injection
•    Buffer overflows
•    Cross site request forgery
•    XPATH injection
•    Format string attacks
•    Heap overflows
•    Redirection attacks
•    Authentication attacks
•    Authorization attacks
•    Canonicalization attacks
•    OS commanding
•    SSI includes
•    Parameter pollution
•    Session based attacks
•    Sniffing
•    Spoofing
•    Phishing
These are only a few examples. Many more exist and the list keeps on getting updated on a regular basis. A simple Google search on “Cross site scripting” or any of these will give you thousands of results, which are enough to explain the vulnerability. There are many security projects(OWASP) and institutes(SANS) working to create freely-available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies to provide unbiased, practical, cost-effective information about application. These communities also release a list of the top vulnerabilities at regular interval of time.
Save Me Please
For each of the vulnerabilities, there exist different ways to mitigate them. However, speaking in a generic manner, all the vulnerabilities can be prevented by proper validations, both on input and output. If only one of these is done, this vulnerability can surely be exploited by an attacker. So, it is always better to have a two way defense mechanism, which acts as a double shield to prevent the attacks against the application. When the development of a application is done, an approach that ensure both these validations at the same time should be followed. This is the best possible solution to mitigate the attacks. As far as targeted application like Acrobat Reader or Microsoft applications are concerned the only way to save yourself, is to have updates which are, released by the vendors. Even if you miss a single update your machine is vulnerable to any type of attack. Presently there are many tools to prevent applications from getting hacked but at the end it’s in the hands of the application developer to make his application secure enough and not only checks if all the doors are locked but ensure that every other entry point is also locked and secured.
Conclusion
Thus, we can conclude that the threats on the applications are on a continuous rise, and developers need to be aware of these and educate themselves so as to involve a secure methodology in the lifecycle of the development. These vulnerabilities are large in number, and hence require a thorough study.