To curb cyber crimes, expert bats for digital signature

It is believed that due to the rapid growth of the net the only way to avoid hackers is through a digital signature. We found a fresh article on this and bring it to you here.

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In these times, where information technology is witnessing a rapid growth, the common man could easily fall prey to hackers and cyber crimes. The only way to overcome such attacks is to go for digital signature, feels Rohas Nagpal, an IT expert, while speaking on Cyber crime investigations and Forensics at the ClubHack 2008, the international convention og hackers in Pune.

Citing numerous ways by which hoax emails could be sent from one’s email account or spoof SMS messages from ones mobile number, without the owners notice, Nagpal said, “Email services and SMS services were not built to authenticate users.”

While hackers could use techniques to play havoc, few Telecom providers or ISP providers would be able to trace the culprit, he said.

“A few years ago, we told police officers across the world that we would be sending them spoof messages on their phones and asked them to trace it back through their telecom operators. No telecom operator was able to trace who had sent the message,” Nagpal said, adding that the only way to shield such attacks is to go for a digital signature, he said.

Nagpal spoke about several tools that hackers use to sniff passwords and credit card details. During the course of the workshop it emerged that banking security is not as it should be, with many banks having fallen prey to hackers. One of the prominent one is Bank of India, where the bank server was severely affected for 14 days.

Nagpal said that banks were liable to pay compensation if the customer money was siphoned off because of fraud. “Customers frequently using online transactions can secure themselves by not using wireless networks, using a powerful anit virus, zone alarms and fire walls,” he added.