Credit cards, is it a Boon or a Bane??

This post particularly concentrates on Credit card robberies.
Are you a Credit or Debit Card user.If so, This is the alert for you...!!

Have you ever noticed the shopkeepers scratching the credit cards in the machine at the time of your bill payment ,after you've taken your goods?? If not, hereafter just notice them. Because at the time of scratching, some culprits may take the advantage of your sluggishness and they can steel your money.If once they have scratched , dont allow them to scratch another time. coz they may report you that the transaction is not proper so ,they may ask for scratching another time. Dont allow them to do because it'd lead to a money loss from your card. you may not notice the action.But when you receive the bill at the month end you'll notice that you've paid for some goods which is irrelavent. You may get confused 'why a huge amount!!' but you cant find the cause.If you start inquiring , atleast it will take a month to solve. so, beware of such shopkeepers.

These statements on Credit Card Robbery has been given by an Higher official in Indian Police Department

"You can very well see a black magnetic strip on the back side of ATM cards and Credit Cards. Its unique with each and evey card. i.e It differs from one card to another. The 16 digit number in the credit cards and the CVV(Credit Verification Value) 4 digit value will be coded under the magnetic strip.If anyone knows the secret numbers they can make an exact duplicate card which is exactly similar to your Credit/Debit Cards.Using that duplicate card they can make the transaction in your account.

Recently we found a magnetic stripped duplicate Credit card which has been locked by the ATM
machine, Due to the wrong pin number given by the culprit. When we were investigating about
this, another thing 'online robbery' has rised its' head,i.e without using credit cards they are making
transactions on someones' account.PayPal cracking is one of the best example.In foregin
countries it has rised to 65% in India it has reached 3% ,we are trying to eradicate the online
robbery.

In mumbai an anonymous made a phone call to a fivestar hotel and he booked 10 rooms by simply by giving someones' credit card number. After 5 days he again rang up to that hotel and he cancelled five rooms and requested the hotel management to credit the amount to his account, but no one occupied the booked rooms.When the card holder got his bill, he was schoked and made a complaint. After that he came to Know that it was a clever robbery. Hotel management did not report this to police coz they are gaining only profit.So, Beware with your cards.

Banks too taking least cares on credit cards . When Debit cards have lost they are fully disabling
the card within a few mins. But when complaint goes on credit card lost they take 36 hours to
deactivate it.This must be eradicated on the whole. Banks must take instant steps to deactivate the lost credit cards. Mostly credit card losers are supposed to pay the bill eventhough their card has lost. So banks are taking least care on credit cards.

So many technologies have been invented.Instead of secret pin they can record the holders' thumb impression and use it as a secret pin.But due to high cost of implementation they are not doing this.

Airlines,Railways,Shopping malls all these have been affected by such clever kinda robbery. Its spreading like a virus. In huge concerns when they get the proper proof that the card has lost they will refund the money, because they use to depriciate a ' Risk Budget ' .They will refund the money of the card holder by using their Risk Budget.They are not ready to complain as they don wanna get black marks.

While scratching your card in the machine dont fail to notice that. If you hand over the card to
someone to pay your bill for example:your servent,Car driver or Restaurent waiter they can
duplicate your cards with in a minute. Because advanced technologies&softwares has came into being ,which can easily track your pin number.So keep your property with you,dont belive anyother people as well as dont allow anyother to use your Credit/Debit Cards"

So the Little Plastic is a Boon or Bane, the decision is yours.....!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Courtesy: Ananda Vikatan Magazine (Aug 1,2007 Ed.)

Internet explorer tricks

Create your web Shortcuts
To create a new shortcut to a Webpage, open Notepad and type [InternetShortcut] on the first line, then URL = followed by the address of the page on the second line. Save the file with a .URL extension. If you save it in \Windows\Favorites folder, it will be added to the Favorites list in your browser.

Find Sites With AutoComplete
Whenever you begin typing a URL in the address box, it tried to find a recently visited page that matches what you are typing. If IE finds a match, it automatically fills in the rest of the address for you. This is not only convenient, it can also be useful if you remember only a part of on Internet address. You can turn the feature on or off from Tools > Internet Options > Advanced. Scroll down to use inline AutoComplete for Web address. Toggle this on or off.

Temporary files!
Clearing the browser cache can retrieve disk space and can also avoid problems on certain Web pages. To clear the files, open Tools > Internet Options. Under the General tab, click on Delete Files to clear the cache.

Offline Web Pages
You can set a page as "offline" so you can read it even when you're not connected. On the Favorites menu, click Add to Favorites. Enable Make available offline. To specify a schedule for updating the page and how much content to download, click Customize. Follow the instructions on screen.

Script errors
You can turn off useless script error messages from popping up. Click on Tools > Internet Options > Advanced. Click the checkbox labeled Disable script debugging. Uncheck the checkbox labeled Display a notification for every script error.

Searching with Style!!
With Internet Explorer, you can search with more than one search engine. click search on the toolbar and click Customize. Customize your search form the window that opens.

Never lose an Interesting site
If you remember visiting a site a week or two ago that you forgot to add to your favorites list, you can still fine it. the History folder maintains a list of all the sites that you visited for a set number of says. To set the number of days. click Tools > Internet Options. Under the General tab, set the Days to Keep Pages in History. You can enter any number between 0 and 999.

Save or print links!
You can save or print the information from linked Web pages without displaying the page on screen. Right-click the link and click Save Target As to save the linked page to your hard disk or Print Target to print the linked page

Boost Extreme Speed to your BroadBand Connection

Boost Extreme Speed to your BroadBand Connection

A. in the "My Network Places" properties (right click on the desktop icon and choose properties), highlight the connection then at the menu bar choose "Advanced" then "Advanced Settings". Uncheck the two boxes in the lower half for the bindings for File and Printer sharing and Client for MS networks. Click OK
B. Continue as indicated below steps:
1. from the Windows XP CD in the support directory from the support cab, extract the file netcap.exe and place it in a directory on your hard drive or even in the root of your C:\ drive.
2. next, open up a command prompt window and change directories to where you put netcap.exe then type "netcap/?". It will list some commands that are available for netcap and a netmon driver will be installed. At the bottom you will see your adapters. You should see two of them if using a 3Com card. One will be for LAN and the other will be for WAN something or other.
3. Next type "netcap/Remove". This will remove the netmon driver.
4. Open up control panel / system / dev man and look at your network adapters. You should now see two of them and one will have a yellow ! on it. Right click on the one without the yellow ! and choose uninstall. YES! you are uninstalling your network adapter, continue with the uninstall. Do not restart yet.
5. Check your connection properties to make sure that no connection exists. If you get a wizard just cancel out of it.
6. Now restart the machine and go to your connection properties again and you should have a new connection called "Local area connection 2". highlight the connection then at the menu bar choose "Advanced" then "Advanced Settings". Uncheck the two boxes in the lower half for the bindings for File and Printer sharing and Client for MS networks. Click OK.
8. Choose connection properties and uncheck the "QOS" box
9. Restart the machine and enjoy the increased responsiveness of IE, faster page loading, and a connection speed boost...

P.S: Take Extreme Care while doing this.

RECOVERING WINDOWS PASSWORD

This method can be used 2 change the password of an xp pc without knowing the current password...follow the steps

Start >> Run >> [type]cmd // this will open your command prompt
[type] net(space)user(press enter)
[type] net(space)user(space)[windowsloginid](space)*(press enter)

// for e.g. : net user HOME *(press enter)

[type] new password (press enter) and retype it (press enter).. it will show u confirmation... // caution it wont show u the password u type.. but it still types.. the blinking pointer will b there at the same place.. but it still works..
// for e.g. : password changed successfully.

Lock Icons On Desktop

You have arranged your desktop to look nicely with your wallpaper. Presently comes someone and mess up the nice arrangement. To lock your desktop icons into place, first arrange it carefully the way you want it to be, then open up the registry editor. Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer. Right-click in the right pane and select New, DWORD Value name NoSaveSettings and press the Enter key. Right-click on the new NoSaveSettings item and select Modify. Enter 1 in the Value data box. After this, whenever you restart Windows, your settings will return to their current state.

Compress drive to save disk space

its not possible to increase ur memory size but u can compress ur data to save ur disk space, this feature is available in NTFS drive..
if u have a fat or fat32 drive, u can convert it to ntfs by running a command on dos:
for c drive:
convert c:/fs:ntfs
for d drive:
convert d:/fs:ntfs
for e drive:
convert e:/fs:ntfs
run the command similarly if u have more drive...

Compresing data in NTFS

* open my computer
* select any drive(drive with NTFS format)
* right click and select properties
* click on general tab
* select "compress drive to save disk space"
* Apply and OK

ur data will remain safe...

Test your Anti Virus

To test if your antivirus is in good shape you should do as in continuing:
Open Notepad and copy this text:

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

the text should be in one horizontal line

Then save file as "eicar.com" including quotation-marks

After some seconds saving this file your antivirus should come with the message that this file is infected virus asking permision for its deletetion/clean.
This file is secure and its not gonna infect your computer in whatever way.It is a standart text developed by the European Institute for Computer Anti-virus Research (EICAR).Every antivirus is programed to load this file as a virus.

If your antivirus is not going to hack this file as a virus ,in your screen will appear DOS window with this text EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE".If this happens then you should probably find some other Antivirus up to date,meaning your PC might
already being infected from viruses and your curent antivirus do not recognize them.

How to stop someone from Hacking you

How To Catch A Hacker

Just wrote this guide to give you some tips of which you may not have heard yet. Hopefully, it won't come to a hacker getting in, but if it does...

Tip 1: Hackers cover their tracks. Experienced hackers cover them more thorougly, but amateur hackers sometimes leave things behind. Don't expect them to leave any really big evidence behind; expect more of little things here and there you might find surprising. For example, if you're writing a term paper and a black hat hacker accidently saved it when he took a paragraph out- that's suspicious. Where did that paragraph go? Well, for one thing, now you know he was in that area. Check the folders surrounding the file- you might find something.

Tip 2: Decipher between the type of hackers that are attacking you. Experienced hackers will have a more in depth look around when they penetrate your system. They won't touch much because they know that that won't add too much to their knowledge. But if you know a hacker's been in, and some files are messed with, and you have a log of someone guessing passwords to a file or something of that sort, its probably some newbie who's just starting out. These are the easiest hackers to catch. They usually get so caught up in thoughts like "I'm in!" that they forget the basics, such as work behind a proxy.

Tip to protect urself:
My friend was setting up a webserver once. His first time too, and he wasn't to anxious to set up some good software to protect against hackers and viruses. He didn't put up one IDS, and before you know it, the obvious happened. But this time, a newbie had struck. The nice log files showed, bluntly across the screen, multiple instances of a foreign IP address that stood out. Some stupid newbie had tried to login as "uucp" on my friend's XP computer, with a password of "uucp." Well, that's great, but he also had tried the same user/pass combination three times, enough to get himself logged nicely. Even a semi-brainless user with some form of neurological system knows that uucp isn't a default XP account. Again, excitement toiled this hacker's brain, and maybe if he hadn't done that, along with a few other stupid things, he wouldn't have gotten caught. What other things did he do? Well, lets see. He openned 35 instances of MS-DOS. He tried to clean the printer's heads, and he edited a .gif in notepad. Then he uninstalled a few programs and installed some html editor, and replaced four files with the words "14P."

he might as well have posted his phone number. In a few days, we had tracked him down to a
suburban town in Ohio. We let him go, not pressing any charges, because he had done nothing really damaging and had provided me with an example of a moron for this guide.

Tip 3: Don't go crazy if you lose data. Chances are, if it was that important, you would have backed it up anyway. Most hackers nowadays wish they were back in 1989 when they could use a Black Box and having a Rainbow Book actually meant something. Most hackers aren't blackhat, they are whitehat, and some even greyhat. But in the end, most hackers that are in systems aren't satisfied by looking around. From past experiences, I have concluded that many hackers like to remember where've they been. So, what do they do? They either press delete here and there, or copy some files onto their systems. Stupid hackers (yes, there are plenty of stupid hackers) send files to e-mail addresses. Some free email companies will give you the IP of a certain e-mail address's user if you can prove that user has been notoriously hacking you. But most of the time, by the time you get the e-mail addy it's been unused for weeks if not months or years, and services like hotmail have already deleted it.

Tip 4: Save information! Any information that you get from a log file (proxy server IP, things like "14P", e-mail addresses that things were sent to, etc.) should be saved to a floppy disk (they're not floppy anymore, I wish I could get out of the habit of calling them that) incase there's a next time. If you get another attack, from the same proxy, or with similar e-mail addresses (e.g: one says Blackjack 123@something.whatever and the other says Black_jack_45@something.znn.com) you can make an assumption that these hackers are the same people. In that case, it would probably be worth the effort to resolve the IP using the proxy and do a traceroute. Pressing charges is recommended if this is a repeat offender.

Tip 5: Don't be stupid. If you've been hacked, take security to the next level. Hackers do talk about people they've hacked and they do post IPs and e-mail addresses. Proof? Take a look at Defcon Conventions. I've never gone to one, but I've seen the photos. The "Wall of Shame"-type of boards I've seen have IPs and e-mail addresses written all over them in fat red, dry-erase ink. Don't be the one to go searching the Defcon website and find your e-mail address posted on the Wall of Shame board!


Tip 6: Don't rely on luck. Chances are, sometime or another, you're going to be targeted for an attack. Here you can rely on luck. Maybe they'll forget? Maybe they don't know how to do it? If you think this way, a surprise is going to hit your face very hard. Another way you could stupidly rely on luck is by saying this: It's probably just a whitehat. On the contrary, my friend, it's probably just a blackhat. A blackhat with knowledge stored in his head, ready to be used as an ax. It's your data. You take the chance.