Synthetic Police by DARPA Engineering Autonomous Robots Ready To Rescue

May 11, 2012 | comments

Because of the risks involved in rescue aid workers and human response teams, DARPA awarded Boston Dynamics, Inc. a $10.9 million contract to manufacture humanoid robots that are bi-pedal, built like humans and have a sensor head with on-board computing capabilities. Completion of the project is expected for August of 2014.

These robots are being created to assist in excavation and rescue missions, according to DARPA . They could also be employed to evacuation operations during either man-made or natural disasters.

Another of DARPA’s interests into robotics is the Avatar for the allocation of bi-pedal robots and essential super-soldiers and has devoted $7 million of its $2.8 billion 2012 budget to developing “interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bi-pedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier’s surrogate.”

These human-controlled robots will be strong enough to “clear a room” and “facilitate sentry control and combat causality recovery.” Yet these “terminators” would easily be the most effective weapon against civil unrest or radical revolutionaries that did not subscribe to the globalist agenda.

Stanford University’s Aerospace Robotics Laboratory (ARL) wants to introduce autonomous robots into law enforcement situations; such as response in lieu of police SWAT teams.

In high-risk tactical situations, autonomous robots could replace trained personnel without threat of injury or loss of life. Under the direction of a tactical commander, those robots could be released to provide safe and secure assurance of mission completion. Possible voice recognition software could be used to allow the commander to direct the robot, convey commands, and gather information about the environment before deploying human law enforcement.

Anonymity

May 10, 2012 | comments

Online Privacy, Anonymity

A VPN allows you to connect to a remote network, and over all ports, encrypt and forward your traffic. This also changes your IP address. Chaining VPNs is a tricky task, though there is a simple and uncommon method I know of. Using multiple VPNs together has the huge perk of being completely anonymous.

How To Chain VPNs

First, a person would connect to the VPN. Then, when connected to the first VPN, you chain to the second, and since a bunch of people share the same IP, the second VPN has no way of knowing who tunnelled to it. An even better scenario is where you use an eastern VPN as your first, because our country has no jurisdiction to retrieve the logs from them, thus increasing your security.
However, to chain VPNs, the second VPN would need to know how the first VPN’s traffic was encrypted. This flaw makes it impossible to chain them in this method, unless you own both VPNs (not very likely).
So, how can we chain VPNs then? I’ll show you how by using a virtual machine!

Requirements

  • Windows, Mac or Linux OS
  • Admin/root privileges
  • OpenVPN
  • VirtualBox
  • 2 VPNs (there are tons of free ones that you can find with google search)

Step 1 Install OpenVPN & a VirtualBox Computer

Text in bold is a terminal command.
First, we need to install the VPN client for Linux users. Windows users can download the program here and here, and run the installer normally. Mac users can use this GUI for OpenVPN for Mac.
  1. Change to the Downloads directory.
  2. Configure the installation.
    ./configure
  3. Compile and install.
    make && sudo make install
  4. Now we need to install VirtualBox. This will allow us to have a virtual operating systems running from within our computer. Download VirtualBox: Windows, Mac, Linux.
  5. Install a virtual machine of your choice for Windows or Linux and Mac, then install OpenVPN to it.

Step 2 Chain the VPNs

Start up your virtual machine, and configure them both.
  1. For Windows users using the default VPN .
  2. Connect to VPN A with your host OS.
  3. Start up your virtual machine of choice, and connect to VPN B with it.
  4. Operate from within your virtual machine, and you will be safe from prying eyes. If you need to delete the virtual machine, make sure you securely delete it, and your information will be safe.

Location Tracking of a Mobile Device Via Silent SMS

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SMS
SMS (Short Message Services) has become an extended part of modern day life. Initially created to send non-sensitive information using spare space in signaling channels, it has now evolved into a feature-rich service.

How SMS is used to track the location of a mobile device

The law enforcement agencies used the basic principle that every time a mobile device performs any activity, it exposes its presence to the Cell tower. If the mobile network can force the mobile device to some very short activity without making it perceptible to the user, then using Radiolocation technologies, the mobile device can be tracked.  To do that, a special type of SMS known as “Silent SMS” is used. Every time a silent SMS is delivered, the mobile silently acknowledges. This creates activities for a mobile which is tracked by a LMU (Location Measurement Unit) at BTS (Base Transceiver Station) by using a variety of multilateration methods.

A commonly used technique for tracking location in GSM network is called E-OTD (Enhanced-Observed Time Difference of arrival) . This is a network-based location tracking method. In this technique, the signal arrival time from the mobile device is measured from 3 BTS/LMUs’. The position of the ME (Mobile Equipment) is determined by comparing the time differences between two sets of timing measurements. The accuracy is between 50 – 200 meters. More accurate location measurement is possible using A-GPS (Assisted GPS) based systems.

In the past using Cell Tower log generated by forcing the target mobile device into some activities, a target’s locations and movements were accurately reconstructed and identified.  In the USA vs. Forrest case, police used similar techniques

The SMS message is specified by the ETSI in documents GSM 03.38  and GSM 03.40. It can be up to 160 characters long, where each character is 7 bits. Eight-bit messages can contain up to 140 characters and are usually not viewable by the phones as text messages. Instead they are used for data in e.g. smart messaging (images and ringing tones) and Over The Air (OTA) provisioning of Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) settings.
Silent messages, often referred to as  “Silent SMS” or “Stealth SMS” is a type of SMS message which when received by a mobile device does not notify either by the display or by a sound. GSM 03.40  describes a Short Message of type 0 which indicates that the mobile equipment must acknowledge receipt of the short message but may discard its contents.

How to create Silent SMS

To create Silent SMS, the SMS PDU (Protocol Data Unit) needs to be manipulated. It is best done from an application that communicates with SMSC (SMS Center) using a protocol called SMPP. To send a SMS, the application need to send SMPP GSM 03.38 encoded Submit_Sm PDU.  A sample Submit_Sm PDU is shown below:

Encoding PDU Header . .’ command length ’ , ( 7 1 ) . . . 00 00 00 47
’ command id ’ , ( 4 ) . . . 00 00 00 04
’ command s t a tus ’ , ( 0 ) . . . 00 00 00 00
’ sequence number ’ , ( 1 ) . . . 00 00 00 01
Encoding PDU Body . .
’ service type ’ , ( 0 ) . . . 30 00
’ source_add r_ t o n ’ , ( 1 ) . . . 01 __ ’ source_ addr_ npi ’ , ( 1 ) . . . 01 **
‘source_ addr ’ , (27829239812) . . . 32 37 38 32 39 32 33 39 38 31 32 00
’dest_addr_ton ’ , ( 1 ) . . . 01 **
’dest_addr_npi ’ , ( 1 ) . . . 01 **
’dest_ addr’ , (27829239812) . . . 32 37 38 32 39 32 33 39 38 31 32 00
’esm_ class ’ , ( 0 ) . . . 00
’protocol_ id ’ , ( 0 ) . . . 00
’priority_flag ’ , ( 0 ) . . . 00
’schedule_delivery_time ’ , ( 0 ) . . . 30 00
’validity_period ’ , ( 0 ) . . . 30 00
’registered_delivery ’ , ( 1 ) . . . 01
’replace_ if_ present_fl ag ’ , ( 0 ) . . . 00
’data_coding ’ , ( 0 ) . . . 00
’sm_default_msg_ id ’ , ( 0 ) . . . 00
’sm_length ’ , ( 0 ) . . . 00
’short_message ’ , ( xyz..etc ) . . . 69 76 69 7A 73 65 63 75 72 69 74 79 2E 63 6F 6D
Full PDU ( 70 o c t e t s + + ) . . 00 00 00 47 00 00 00 04 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 01 30 00 01 01 32 37 38 32 39 32 33 39 38 31 32 00 01 01 32 37 38
32 39 32 33 39 38 31 32 00 00 00 00 30 00 30 00 01 00 00 00 00 73 61
74 6E 61 63 2E 6F 72 67 2E 7A
** ( 0 )  indicates local numeric numbering formatting
( 1 ) indicates international numeric number formatting
++ Octet is a group of 8 bits , often referred to as a byte

There are many different ways to manipulate SMS PDU but many of them may cause mobile device malfunctioning. The two techniques described by N.J Croft and M.S Olivier ["A silent SMS denial of service (DoS) attack," Proceedings of the Southern African Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference 2007 (SATNAC 2007), Sugar Beach Resort, Mauritius, September 2007 (Published electronically)]  were used and found working are: Manipulating Data Encoding Scheme and Manipulating Timing in a WAP Push Message.

In the first technique, the data_encoding attribute of SMS PDU was set to 0xC0. This sets the MWIG (Message Waiting Indication Group) identifier that as per GSM 03.38 translates to “Discard Message”. The mobile device on receiving the message discards it after sending delivery acknowledgement.
In the second technique, the scheduled_delivery_time   is set to a date and time before today in the format “YYMMDDhhmmsstnn”. It was observed that the message was delivered, delivery acknowledgement was sent by the mobile device but the message was never displayed.




Easy Way To Defeat a “Keylogger”

May 3, 2012 | comments

Free keylogger
There are several ways to defeat a keylogger. I wanted to describe an easy way which does not need any software or cost you money. It is not a revolutionary or new but quite useful. Some of you may already be practicing the same.

Keyloggers and Trojans can steal you passwords, credit card details or important information while you type them on your system. We are sometimes bound to use third party systems or even our own systems may be compromised (of which we may not be aware of). So how do we defeat a keylogger?


Method

Let’s assume your password is “savemefromkeyloggers”. So when you type the password you need to ensure that you type the above password in a different obfuscated scheme. I am explaining this through an example.

Step 1:  Type “veme”

Step 2: Use your mouse pointer to bring the cursor just before “veme” and type “sa”. So what you see is “saveme” but the keylogger log would read as “vemesa”

Step 3: Use your mouse pointer to bring the cursor just after “saveme” and type “ggers”. So what you see is “savemeggers” but the keylogger log would read as “vemesaggers”

Step 4: Use your mouse pointer to bring cursor before “ggers” and type “fromkeylo”. So what you see is “savemefromkeyloggers” but the keylogger log would read as “vemesaggersfromkeylo”

Important Note: Do not use the “arrow keys” to move the cursor. Use the mouse to click at the right place so that the password key strokes are jumbled up and the keylogger owner would not be able to understand your real password.
So you can create your own method to jumble up/obfuscate your “credit card number”, “CSV”, “passwords” or anything that is critical. It is a good practice to always use the same pattern to obfuscate the same data since it would make it more difficult for anybody to decode the real password from a single sample of obfuscated password. It becomes easier to decode when there is a sample of several obfuscated forms of the same password.

Disclaimer: This method do not protect against the advanced crimeawares which use techniques like “Form Grabbing” etc. The good news is that most of the commonly available cheap keyloggers are not all equipped with the same.
 
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