Catching kevin (My review on operation overdrive)

Indeed that was the jingle being chanted in the states in the later half of the ‘90’s.”KEVIN MITNICK” one of the world’s deadliest black hats was taken down and imprisoned him. After a lot of hullabaloo and ooo’s and ahh’s the FBI and the NYPD had successfully grasped a firm hold on Kevin.

But how was he caught and why did the FBI begin this frantic hunt? .Well, as I did tell, Kevin Mitnick was a black hat computer cracker as well a hacker. He was born on August 6^th 1963. He studied and grew up in L.A. Kevin was a good athlete and also good in studies then the question is what compelled him to become a hacker. The answer is not known yet. There were talks that his mom never had stable relationships and so maybe he hacked to keep his mind off his family problems and the other explanation would be that he was too curious. Curiosity is something that drives humans and gets unexpected things out of him.

Kevin’s methods weren’t entirely computer based. It can be called the art of intrusion without actually knowing how to intrude. He used a lot of Social Engineering to get information. Social engineering is the method of obtaining information from a subject by normal communication and negotiation. It wasn’t like you had to be suave or an equivalent to get the information from the horses mouth. Kevin Mitnick engineered people by just calling them and telling them that he had this job to be done or else his boss would fire him and people would just give away computer passwords.

 The frantic hunt or as it is called the Takedown started when Kevin began sticking his hands in IBM’s pants. He also allegedly got his hands dirty by get into the Motorola NEC, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu Siemens systems. He got administrative access to IBM’s minicomputer just to win a bet. He also copied different kinds of software’s and also cracked computer passwords and changed the networks. The very name Mitnick brought shivers in the computer valley’s of LA. No-one in the whole of LA wanted mess with him or be on his hit list.

In December 1994, Kevin broke into the IBM’s security expert Tsutomu Shimomura’s computer to get some cellular cloning tools. Tsutomu Shimomura was aggravated and made it a point to catch Mitnick. In December that very year Tsutomu Shimomura found that his stolen software and cloning tools we’re constantly being used from a Netcom account. A couple of subtle hints made Tsutomu Shimomura sure that Kevin was behind this. It was found that this Netcom account was constantly in links with a Israeli account which was being accessed infrequently. Tsutomu Shimomura with a couple of another investigations confirmed that he could track him but tracking him wouldn’t be so easy. He supposedly tracked his POP address and discovered that he was operating from a Raleigh. Many people worked on this track and trace Kevin project. It mystifies my why did it take so many men to takedown one computer cracker who didn't consider studying code. These men along with Tsutomu Shimomura tracked Kevin and he was imprisoned for 5 years

Kevin’s constant intrusion and obsessive cracking made him a legend. People fear his name in some parts of LA. Kevin made his own computer security firm called Mitnick security Consulting LLC in which he works as a computer security consultant and gives them tips how to protect their computers from the constant meddling of crackers and inquisitive kiddies. He’s only mistake was his curiosity and as we know the saying “Curiosity isn't a sin but we should exercise it with caution”.      

Bletchley Park–The Birth place of computer science and cryptography

People have always spoken about how wars were won. The main credits are always given to the guys on  the fields, but all wars weren't won on the war fields, were they? They were fought in the backyards and such is the story of Bletchley  park.

Bletchley Park is an amazing story of unsung war heroes who played games from the inside. Alan Turing and his men assisted in hijacking! No, they weren't terrorists! They hijacked messages passing in the German camp. These guys didn't specifically announce what they were going to do until they started their work. They got a good set of cumbersome computers working and encrypting information about the war. The reason why I called those computers cumbersome was because they weren't android phones :p. They were huge on

es and definitely tough to crack.

Many would say Bletchley Park is merely a historic monument, but the place bared witness to many amazing advances in the computer continuum. The place used to be a Mecca for some engineers because of the Legends who worked there and type of computers invented on its holy land. It is located in Bletchley which is currently in Buckinghamshire.

Many of the university scholars like Dr. Alan Turing were told to report to Bletchley Park immediately in 1939 in anticipation of war. The workforce was limited, so many of these scholars had to return  their universities and recruit their best students,  hence eventually inventing a secret society which would help out in intercepting the German message sending and receiving systems. With a lot of persuasion and message decryption being the need of the hour, Winston Churchill agreed on providing the engineers at the Park with resources they needed.

Many of these engineers solved problems and labyrinths which would have haunted computer societies for years. Bletchley Park could be considered an old version of CERN where people from different backgrounds came together and helped build new technology or look at it from a different perspective.

The Germans used to send messages to their troops regarding war strategies and lots of other stuff. These messages could easily be intercepted. The wired channels were compromised by cutting the wire and tricking the system by setting up an artificial receiver. The wireless communication channel, on the other hand was stalled by just installing a wireless receiver and finding out the right frequency for the same. Eventually and gradually the Germans got smarter with all the information being leaked. The Germans hired an encrypting machine called Enigma which would encrypt the message into different syllables and would leave the interceptor entirely clueless as to what the message is!

 There were some polish engineers who discovered a way to crack the enigma encryption by using a machine called BOMBA, which also meant polish ice cream dessert. Alan Turing covered the shortcomings of the BOMBA and made his own computer which was called the BOMBE. Alan Turing assumed that the German would use text. He would predict the presence of the text at a certain point. This was called a plaintext attack. The bombe weighed about one ton, was housed in a bronze-colored metal cabinet about 7 feet wide, 6 feet 6 inches tall and 2 feet deep and was mounted on castors. Protruding from the front of the cabinet there were 108 shafts (more in some models, fewer in the two prototypes) arranged in three 12 x 3 arrays on which drums were mounted. The Bombe would simulate 36 Enigma machines which was quite resourceful.

In event of this the Germans stopped using the Enigma system and started a new  system which were called secret writers which used tele-printer traffic  for encrypting and making it much more difficult to decrypt. In reply to this, the Bletchley park scientist put together a prototype called Colossus. This machine contained 1600 thermionic valves (tubes) and was soon followed by an improved production Mark 2 machine. Nine of this version of the machine were constructed, the first being commissioned on 1 June 1944, after which Allen Coombs  took over leadership of Colossus production. The original Mark 1 machine was converted into a Mark 2 and an eleventh Colossus was essentially finished when the war in Europe ended. The main units of Colossus' design were as follows:-

A tape transport and photo-electric reading mechanism , coder and adder that simulated the Lorenz machine using thyratron rings, logic unit that performed Boolean operations. A master control that contained the electronic counters, printer.

 The machine  decrypted messages in 6 hours which would take 6 weeks to decrypt by hand. This increased the usefulness of the machine.

Bletchley Park is s place of historic importance in terms of computing. It harbored many free minded scientists and vented the mindset for others.  It’s now turned into a museum and yes it’s glistening but not with ghost, with heroes who gave it their best and in turn produced the greatest computers of all time. 

Python (Not the snake)

I mainly got introduced to python because of a friend who wanted to do something worthwhile rather
than pondering over comics. I admit  first impressions weren't good at all as I shared my hatred for
verbose languages with quite a few. Usually it starts with some script seeing and later total diving  but
this is totally the other way around . Python is one of the easiest languages there and always will be .
The reason I took an initial liking was because the core programming scripts are understand and short. You could handle files with a few lines of code which kinda represent your every day language (I.e that is if you speak any English).Python combines styles from different languages. You could write your for
loops by using the C/C++/Java way or just write it using a way python provides. It doesn’t enforce an environment on you.

Python doesn't require you to reinvent the wheel. There are modules which  are present and its a taboo for you to code them again.  Almost all the string operations which  are added in python . No, you don't
have to write a program to reverse strings, it's there for you and you just have to call the function.
Python will spoonfeed you with almost everything . This may be considered bad by some programmers, but according to me it allows us to concentrate on something far more important than reversing string
:p
I started off with 2x which is python version 2. It's really simple because its got both object oriented and procedural approaches combined.  The thing about 2x is that there are many ways of doing things. There are functions like filter, reduce and lambda ( anonymous functions)  which again will make your life
easier.
The mistake I made initial was learning both 2x and 3x together. 3x is a developmental version. They release a new version every week or so. The thing about using 3x is that you make not be blessed with the latest binaries and libraries for the frameworks which are already in place(source: Installing pygame on version 3x was a pain in my anatomy) .
Python has many web frameworks which are usually updated by keeping tabs on the guys at ROR.
People usually choose Django over other frameworks which isn't the most lightest (flask is the lightest) but is the most famous with Django Unchained et al.
Python also allows you build clean interfaces using Tkinter  . I usually don't use Tkinter but the code is quite small and compact. This is code for a simple hello world program in Tcl/tk
 import tkinter as tk

class Application(tk.Frame):    def __init__(self, master=None):
        tk.Frame.__init__(self, master)
        self.pack()
        self.createWidgets()
    def createWidgets(self):
        self.hi_there = tk.Button(self)
        self.hi_there["text"] = "Hello World\n(click me)"
        self.hi_there["command"] = self.say_hi
        self.hi_there.pack(side="top")
        self.QUIT = tk.Button(self, text="QUIT", fg="red",command=root.destroy)
        self.QUIT.pack(side="bottom")
    def say_hi(self):
        print("hi there, everyone!")
root = tk.Tk()
app = Application(master=root)
app.mainloop()

That's it. I've never used it for my GUI programming but would definitely want to.  This could be of great
use if you don’t understand symbols and I don’t see why anyone shouldn’t get it. Many of the problems
for which I wrote 1 page long codes have been seldom reduced to a single line. It’s a great platform for beginners and just builds on the novice’s knowledge.