The Hacker News — Cyber Security, Hacking, Technology News

Privacy of Internet users is dead somewhere as the Intelligence agencies can watch our every move, hear our every conversation and read our every email and find out anything related to our personal and private life. 

Last year, Edward Snowden revealed about the mass surveillance carried out by NSA and other countries intelligence agencies on every citizen of their country.

The US Government has allotted a large share of its 'Black Budget' for secret surveillance programs and to make this happen, NSA has used a number of unethical ways and labelled as legal solutions, harvesting hundreds of millions of Metadata from emails, web activity, chats, social networks, and everything else around the world.

The revelations encouraged Internet users think about their privacy and digital rights, and the time came when different organisations started several campaigns to block mass surveillance and fight back against the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).

RESET YOUR INTERNET PRIVACY RIGHTS

A wider coalition of more than hundreds of Internet companies and civil liberties, environmental and political organizations is arriving together with a global call to “Reset the Net” that aimed to beat government and corporate surveillance on the web making mass Internet surveillance more difficult for the NSA and other spy agencies and governments.

The campaign is similar to 'The Black-Out Day', the largest online protest in the history of the Internet, successfully carried out by Google, Wikipedia, Wordpress and many other companies to protest two federal bills, the Senate’s Protect IP Act and the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). Thousands of websites went dark over the internet to stop mass surveillance conducted by the government.

But later the US government molded its Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in such a way that, now it legally allowed them to monitor Billions of calls in a day and tracking a million of the devices, and this is what we cannot allow them to make happen.

The new campaign is organized by Fight for the Future, which is planning a day to "Reset the Net" by deploying new privacy tools and enhanced security measures on June 5, exactly a year after the first Edward Snowden revelation regarding the NSA’s PRISM program, based on documents the former NSA contractor provided to the media.

The coalition includes Web sites such as Reddit, Boing Boing, Imgur, DuckDuckGo, the Free Software Foundation, CREDO Mobile, along with a number of organizations like the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Demand Progress, the Open Technology Institute, the Libertarian Party.

"The NSA is exploiting weak links in Internet security to spy on the entire world, twisting the Internet we love into something it was never meant to be: a panopticon," they say. "We can't stop targeted attacks, but we *can* stop mass surveillance, by building proven security into the everyday Internet."

HOW TO JOIN

The groups are encouraging developers to add at least one NSA resistant feature to mobile apps and Internet users to use privacy and security tools such as a secure version of HTTP i.e. HTTPS, HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), a Web security policy tool, and Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) which is a public key cryptography tool to better secure the communication of Internet users and fail government intelligence agencies’ man-in-the-middle attacks.

“HTTPS, HSTS, and PFS are powerful tools that make mass spying much more difficult,” the groups state. “Until websites use them, we’re sunk: agencies like the NSA can spy on everything. Once they're ubiquitous, mass surveillance is much harder and more precarious—even if you’re the NSA.”

The Government and NSA always defended their mass surveillance program as a part of the legal action, by saying that it is necessary and only carried out to target terrorists and related crimes just to protect the security of the nation.

But we, sitting over here, are not fool to differentiate between the ‘security of the nation’ and ‘security of our privacy’. One has no right to risk other’s security to protect one’s own.

So, will you all, who are reading this article right now, go back and sit relax? You should not. Go and protect your privacy and digital rights, and Join the campaign. We will not remain quiet now. Enough is Enough.

So you want to be a Programmer? Want to learn - How to code, Debug, and Program? The Web is full of free resources that can turn you into a programmer in no time, but never knew Where to start or How to troubleshoot your programs.

Learning How to be a good programmer begins with learning logic concepts and language syntax and Google is a superb search engine, used by the majority of users online for finding information.

But most of the time we don't get helping hands 'easily & quickly' to debug our programs using Google or other Search engines. Learning to program is hard enough, but debugging is a critical skill, actually - it's frustrating!

DuckDuckGo, a private search engine that doesn't track your data over the internet and respects your online privacy, offers hundreds of Goodies that let you quickly do certain things like Programming, Math, Geek, Music related things.

In our previous article, we have posted Cryptography hacks using DuckDuckGo search engine and today we are going to give another tutorial on DuckDuckGo Goodies for Sysadmins.

Meaning of FTP Code: Being a system administrator, you might need to connect to a number of FTP servers. While handling FTP service you must be aware of the response code that it will give you when you initiate a connection or a new command.
The FTP server response code will be of three digits and each digit has a special meaning. First digit denotes whether the response is good, bad or incomplete.

There are hundreds of such FTP response codes. DuckDuckGo provides system administrators a facility to find the meaning of the response code received from the FTP server i.e.

ftp 230

Meaning of HTTP response code: Similar to FTP servers, web servers also give a response in the form of codes which are used by browser to manipulate the received data, and helps system admin to identify the error and hence can be debugged i.e.

http status 402

Check Site status - UP or DOWN: There are many reasons why you might not be able to connect to a specific website, but that does not mean the web site you want to look at is down.
Using DuckDuckGo a user can easily check whether a website is UP or not, also gives the load time of the web page, you are trying to access i.e.

is thehackernews.com up?

Check Port Number details: A port number is a way to identify a specific process to which an Internet or other network message is to be forwarded when it arrives at a server. Port numbers are associated with network addresses.  Port number ranges from 0 to 65535, which seems a very large number to remember.

DuckDuckGo enables you to search the service bound to that port number i.e.

port 443

WHOIS Information: On the Internet there are more than a billion websites. Your curiosity or your job may force you to find out who owns a particular domain name, e.g. thehackernews.com
DuckDuckGo gives you a tool to search the public details of the website owner from the WHOIS database directory i.e.

whois facebook.com

Locate IP Address: If you can find out the IP address of an Internet user, you can get an idea what part of the country or world they're in by using IP Lookup tool. DuckDuckGo allows you to find your IP address i.e.

ip address

and if you want to locate an IP address, can just enter lookup location i.e.

14.141.92.130

You can find more DuckDuck's Sysadmin Goodies on official website.

Over the past several months, it has become clear that the Internet and our Privacy have been fundamentally compromised. A Private search engine DuckDuckGo claims that when you click on one of their search results, they do not send personally identifiable information along with your request to the third party.

Like Google dorks (advance search patterns), there are thousands of similar, but technically more useful search hacks are also available in DuckDuckGo called DuckDuckGoodies. Today I am going to share about Handy "Cryptography" using DuckDuckGo search engine.

Whether you are a Hacker, Cracker or a Researcher, you need to face a number of hash strings in your day to day life. Hashing is a one way encryption of a plain text or a file, generally used to secure passwords or to check the integrity of the file. There is a certain set of hashing algorithms, e.g.md5, sha1, sha-512 etc.

A hash function generates the exact output if executed n number of times with the same input. If there is a very small change in the input, there will be a difference between the two outputs.

Duckduckgo is a search engine which gives you a flexibility to perform such operations. It enables user to generate the hash of strings, find the algorithm used for generating a hash, give other equivalent hashes of certain hash input.

1.) Generating a Strong Password: The security and integrity of our passwords are a constant battle. The password is the only lock which can make your private information more secure. One of the biggest reasons why people use weak passwords is usually a combination of convenience, and the ability to recall them easily. But using a weak password is the equivalent to installing a lock on your front door that you could open with a Popsicle stick.

Last year, we reported that hackers managed to crack 16-character alphanumeric password in less than an HOUR. No password is foolproof, but by using a long, unique and strong password you can make your password complicated enough to slow down password cracking programs. DuckDuckGo provides you a feature of generating a strong password instantly.

Search Term: password 15 strong

Where 15 is the password length.

2.) Generating a Hash: Hashing makes it difficult for an attacker to retrieve the original plain text string back from the encrypted password and it lets sites keep a list of hashes, rather than plain text passwords.

Using DuckDuckGo's Handy option, you can generate a hash value of any string just by using the following syntax on the search engine.

md5 TheHackerNews

sha512 TheHackerNews

sha TheHackerNews

sha224 TheHackerNews

sha256 TheHackerNews

sha384 TheHackerNews

Where TheHackerNews is the plain text string and md5 or sha is the hashing algorithm.

3.) Identifying Hash Algorithm: Manual finding of the algorithm used for generating the hash is a tedious task. DuckDuckGo provides you an inbuilt hash identification tool, which allows you to identify the hashing algorithm used for generating the hash string given as input.

4.) Finding Plain text from Hashes: One more great feature provided by DuckDuckGo search engine is that it gives you plain text value and equivalent hash code in other algorithms. DuckDuckGo is not cracking hashes for you, but actually matches the hash value of the previously leaked database archive.

Tor exit enclave: DuckDuckGo also operates a Tor exit enclave, which basically means that if you’re using DuckDuckGo through the Tor anonymity tool, you will achieve end-to-end anonymous, encrypted search that is faster than what you might expect with Tor browsing, alone.

The world of mobile search is about to get a bit more anonymous. Thanks to the fears over government surveillance and corporate tracking, Anonymous Search Engine DuckDuckGo continues to break its own search records.

DuckDuckGo Search & Stories - Android app deliver the same functionality as traditional services such as Google but with the added promise that your IP address and identity will not be recorded. 

In June, Anonymous search engine DuckDuckGo had launched its app for iOS and Android and during recent update, DuckDuckGo's application for Android also integrated the Tor support.

“Privacy is perhaps more important on mobile than on the web, and we haven’t had many private alternatives,” DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg said.

To enable Tor with DuckDuckGo android app, user need to Check "Enable Tor" from setting. It will prompt the user to install about application to anonymize the Mobile data communication.

As a search engine, DuckDuckGo has some other great features as well, but the support of the Anonymous Tor network is certainly something that many Privacy Concern users will appreciate.