tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-38995932024-10-07T01:44:53.023-04:00Security, Networking, New technologies, whatever it takes to make internet a better place. An attempt to fight against bad guys, spammers and spyware.<br> To send feedback, send me an email at mukul_d@yahoo.comMukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.comBlogger65125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-36978803485278045102010-10-21T16:30:00.001-04:002010-10-21T16:36:52.436-04:00

As the first test match of the recently concluded series between India and Australia entered and then progressed through the final day, I went from feeling hopeful to despair to anguish to disgust to tense and finally to euphoria. I can't remember the last time I went through so many emotions in a single day (or night in my case). At a point in time when VVS Laxman and Ishant Sharma were playing,

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-79239172568410349432010-09-29T02:32:00.000-04:002010-09-29T02:32:36.018-04:00

At least temporarily till my internet service is back up. I have had a long outage in my internet service from Comcast. My internet service inexplicably went down last week sometime on Tuesday &amp; it is still not up. That has directly affected my website &amp; I am hosting my website at my home on my own web server. I was hoping that I will get my internet service back up and running quickly.

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1142282792387662022006-03-13T15:44:00.000-05:002006-03-13T15:46:32.400-05:00

Effective 11 March 2006, we have moved to our own website at http://www.dharwadkar.com.We no longer will post at this location unless except our webserver goes down for any reason and for extended period. Thank you for visiting us here and if you liked the content we put up here, please do visit us at www.dharwadkar.comThanks.

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1140809081271392672006-02-24T14:01:00.000-05:002006-02-24T14:26:13.496-05:00

If you have not yet tried out MyGoogle / Google Fusion (whatever you want to call it.) then you definitely are missing something. It is one of the coolest things Google has offered after Google Earth. You have to have a Google account to use that, of course. Once you have that you can customize it to your heart's content. It also gives a development kit for techie guys to develop their own

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1140626822535709632006-02-22T11:33:00.000-05:002006-02-22T15:56:33.736-05:00

Its been almost 3 months since my last post. No, I have not been idling away. In fact I have put up my own website and will be moving this to the website very soon. Last couple of months have been a frenzy to catch up on a lot of things. Setting up the website, configuring the webserver, putting up content. I have not yet managed to put up enough content or design it completely and I thought I

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1133588145857935422005-12-03T00:25:00.000-05:002005-12-03T00:35:45.866-05:00

Hello. After a long hiatus of more than a month, I am back at blogging. It's been a crazy month. By the way, did you know that 30th November was celebrated as Computer Security Day? I guess not many of you know about it. Even the site (www.computersecurityday.org) does not have a lot of stuff to talk about.ISACA, of which I am a member is a sponsor and even ISACA does not advertise it as

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1129782114473217402005-10-20T00:21:00.000-04:002005-10-20T00:21:54.480-04:00

Managing data moving in and out of an organization through removable media was easy in the good old days of floppy disk drives. You just disable the drive. Or even better, remove it from the computer. As the technology advanced (read OS and applications got fatter) floppy disks become unviable and obsolete and slowly went away from the workplace PCs.Then came CD writers, becoming more and more

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1129264273130803492005-10-13T23:49:00.000-04:002005-10-14T00:31:13.136-04:00

I had posted my thoughts about having a common software flaw rating system in October. The National Infrastructure Advisory Council, a group of 30 companies that advises President Bush, commissioned a Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). The CVSS is the first step towards what I had said. The system needs to mature over several cycles and should have the support of the entire industry to

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1128652146037794882005-10-06T21:37:00.000-04:002005-10-06T22:29:06.043-04:00

One of the biggest selling point of Mozilla Firefox browser was that it was more secure than Microsoft Internet Explorer. No more! There have been documented vulnerabilities in Firefox not dissimilar to that exist in IE. The link above takes to a report from Symantec that slams Firefox. How much should we read into that remains to be seen as Symantec is a known Microsoft supporter. But we cannot

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1128030941264984702005-09-29T17:44:00.000-04:002005-09-29T17:55:41.290-04:00

This is for the first time I am able to follow-up on some of my posts. I just couldn't stand not writing about this. Barely a week after my last post and spending enough time pondering on that approach, I picked up the latest copy of Network World (www.nww.com). This week's issue is all about the current industry buzz (http://www.networkworld.com/buzz/2005/?ts) in various industries and areas of

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1127340265718651142005-09-21T17:22:00.000-04:002005-09-21T18:04:25.723-04:00

I was reading through this article by Marcus Ranum and was startled by the approach the author took. But as I read on I realised that most of the ideas and concepts make sense. Fighting against cyber crime is like fighting against the mythological Hydra where as soon as you cut one head a new ones appear from there. So how do we fight against such a monster? I concur with the author here; we

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1126890850869429902005-09-16T10:46:00.000-04:002005-09-16T13:14:10.926-04:00

I was one of the recipients of the Nigeria 419 scam and although the emails and the offers are very tempting I abstained from responding and was saved. However, this was not the only email scam I received. I received some highly plausible emails from people in Zimbabwe (?) at the height of the Robert Mugage against white people in Zimbabwe episode asking me to provide for a bank account where

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1126545509733765862005-09-12T12:20:00.000-04:002005-09-12T13:18:29.740-04:00

I have been meaning to write about this for a long time and as always procrastination has been my best friend all along... Anyways now that I have come around to write this, let me go into this before I start wandering off everywhere.Indian government has received recommendations from a committee setup for reviewing the Information Technology act. (http://www.mit.gov.in/itact2000/ITAct.doc). The

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1126201670069782492005-09-08T13:03:00.000-04:002005-09-08T13:47:50.076-04:00

See what comes out of procrastination? I have been meaning to write this post for some time now but always used to procrastinate. I have been playing with Google Earth for sometime now. Firstly I was so fascinated by the power and everyday used to locate my house over here in the US and back in India, just for the fun of it (Read one of my earlier posts). Once the initial novelty wore off, I

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1124386573823967022005-08-18T13:20:00.000-04:002005-08-18T13:36:13.830-04:00

While researching and looking at various IT security companies like F-Secure, ISS, McAfee or even companies like Microsoft, Oracle or other companies, there was one thing I noticed and felt very strongly about. Every company has their own ways to rate a particular threat or vulnerability. For example, Microsoft labels vulnerabilities, threats as Critical, Important, Moderate, etc; McAfee rates as

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1124163796306338992005-08-15T23:36:00.000-04:002005-08-15T23:43:16.310-04:00

I know this is way out of context and does not really gel well with the subject of my weblog. But so do (don't) the previous 2. It's just that I am not able to concentrate hard and those two subjects (in addition to this) were too good to let pass. I had infact decided to mention my 50th post separately, just to commemorate 50 posts and 3 years of sporadic blogging. I have been much more active

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1124141878423288662005-08-15T17:09:00.000-04:002005-08-15T17:37:58.426-04:00

Today is India's 58th independance day. On 15th August 1947, India threw away the shackles of British Rule and began its tryst with destiny. In these short 58 years India has risen to number 12 in the list of world top economies. Of course the list is 5 years old and this definitely would have changed by now. But the point is India is ahead of the "rich" countries. But the aim should be to topple

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1123867618335160102005-08-12T13:15:00.000-04:002005-08-12T13:26:58.340-04:00

I may be really late on commenting on Firefox, but here it is anyways. Firefox has been a real hit with the markets and internet surfers. The users go on increasing with every moment. I was reading a couple of online articles on the next release and increasing adoption of Firefox as an option to Microsoft Internet Explorer and the numbers startled me. The report dated July 22 claimed 50 million

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1122667501026196422005-07-29T14:48:00.000-04:002005-07-29T16:05:01.033-04:00

After a long and nail-biting wait for the results of the CISA exam, I am relieved to know that I have passed the exam successfully. It had been some very difficult months for me leading up to the exams. You see I was back in India at the I registered for the exam and I had registered for it in Washington DC in anticipation of my assignment in the US starting sometime February this year. The trip

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1122662095551979752005-07-29T14:16:00.000-04:002005-07-29T14:34:55.556-04:00

I had my first very serious bout with Spyware. And sadly enough, it won the war. I won the first round by identifying the Spyware, but the originator had hid it very well and would have taken me some more time to get to the root of it. But this was the computer in a corporate organization where re-installation is not a big deal and to top it, the computer was the home computer of the President of

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1122403856467057812005-07-26T12:54:00.000-04:002005-07-26T14:55:22.293-04:00

Microsoft yesterday launched a new product called Virtual Earth, which is being called as Microsoft's answer to Google Maps (which by the way is very impressive). Virtual Earth is still not available on Microsoft's website, only in some forums. No definitive information yet. But they are late, very late. Google has launched another product called Google Earth which while working off the internet

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1122395952077933502005-07-26T12:27:00.000-04:002005-07-26T12:39:12.083-04:00

Microsoft has changed the name of the latest in the line of Windows family of Operating system to Windows Vista. As everybody knows it was code named as Windows Longhorn (which seemed funny to me). The good part seems to be Microsoft finally seems to be moving away from the ridiculous year based naming convention they were following since Windows 95. First it was Windows XP and now it is Windows

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1121721268043369432005-07-18T14:32:00.000-04:002005-07-19T10:27:43.190-04:00

In today's electronic world where hackers are always on the prowl to break you network "sniffing" around and looking for a vulnerability, how do you ensure that your network is protected and hidden away from the hackers and the bad guys? One of the options could be honeypots. Honeypots are essentially decoys put in place to lure attackers away from the paydirt and are closely monitored for

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1121289568004323632005-07-13T17:07:00.000-04:002005-07-13T17:19:28.010-04:00

This is an article that appeared on Network World. Although this is not very much related to what I want to post on my weblog, but I could not hold back posting this. Please see the part about the guy, Anil wanting to do well in his studies. Well no surprises there. Everybody wants to do well in their studies. But why does he wants to do so well? So that companies from foreign countries can

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3899593.post-1121284706358754692005-07-13T14:51:00.000-04:002005-07-13T15:58:26.363-04:00

Imagine your home without fencing. Traditionally we have been putting fences (compound walls) around our house to deter unwelcome visitors and make it hard for them to get inside and also to demarcate the property we own. What would happen if we take away the wall? There would be no boundary, no restrictions to prevent anyone from entering into our premises. Right? That's what we would think.Now

Mukulhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01377153054048101034noreply@blogger.com0