3-DAY WORKSHOP

A three day workshop on Cyber Crime and Forensic Tools was organized by National Institute of Technical Teachers Training & Research (NITTTR), from 17th – 19th November 2014 at Chandigarh. Eight faculty members from different colleges attended this workshop. Prof. Vishal Bharti, Head of Department, Computer Science Engineering and Prof. (Dr.) Neelam Ruhil, Head of Department, Electronics and Computers represented Dronacharya College of Engineering, Gurgaon in the workshop.

On the first day of workshop, Inauguration Ceremony was followed by a special session on “Types of Attacks” by Dr. Maitreyee Dutta. Dr. Dutta defined that Cyber-attack is a type of offensive manoeuvre employed by individuals or whole organizations that targets computer information systems, infrastructures, computer networks, and personal computer devices by various means of malicious acts usually originating from an anonymous source that either steals, alters, or destroys a specified target by hacking into a susceptible system. These can be labelled as a Cyber campaign or cyberterrorism in different context. Dr. Dutta also described that Cyber-attacks can range from installing spyware on a PC to attempts to destroy the infrastructure of entire nations and explained that how these cyber-attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and dangerous. He also explained about preventive measures that can be taken to keep the data secure from various intruders. The other two sessions were taken by Mr. Kamaldeep on Helix, which is an open source forensic tool.

On Second day, Mr. Pawan and Ms. Ritu Kapoor explained about OSForensics and Truecrypt. Ms. Kapoor explained that TrueCrypt is a discontinued source-available freeware utility used for on-the-fly encryption (OTFE). It can create a virtual encrypted disk within a file or encrypt a partition or the entire storage device. She also explained that TrueCrypt supports parallelized encryption for multi-core systems. The next session was on Netsluth and USB Blocker by Ms. Manisha, followed by the lab session. Ms. Manisha explained that NetSluth is an open source network forensics and analysis tool, which is designed for triage in incident response situations. It can identify and fingerprint network hosts and devices from Pcap files captured from Ethernet or WiFi data. NetSluth also includes a live mode, silently identifying hosts and devices without needing to send any packets or set the network adapters into promiscuous mode called as silent port scanning.

On the third day, two sessions on Metasploit and Hacking Biography was taken by Mr. Saurabh Kaushal, in which he explained that the Metasploit Project is a computer security project that provides information about security vulnerabilities and aids in penetration testing and IDS signature development. Its best-known sub-project is the open source Metasploit Framework, which is a tool for developing and executing exploit code against a remote target machine. Various other sub-projects include the Opcode Database and shell code archive. The Metasploit Project is well known for its anti-forensic and evasion tools, some of which are built into the Metasploit Framework. Mr. Kaushal also discussed various types of hacking attacks, hackers and techniques followed by practice session. The workshop ended by valedictory session in which Dr. Maitreyee Dutta gave the valedictory speech followed by the vote of thanks and feedback from the participants. The workshop proved to be very informative as the participants learnt lot about various categories of cybercrimes and forensic tools, along with the areas of research associated with it.

Some Glimpses