As part of a plea-bargaining arrangement, Christopher Scott, 25, of Miami, has admitted to computer hacking, access device fraud and identity theft, according to the Associated Press. He could face a sentence of up to 22 years in jail and a fine of up to $1m (£538,000).

The plea comes almost two weeks after Damon Patrick Toey pleaded guilty to his role. The 11 defendants were formally charged last month. Three are from the US, one from Estonia, three from the Ukraine, two from China, and one from Belarus. Another man involved used an alias and his whereabouts are unknown.

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Hello Everybody !

As I had promised in my previous post, I’m going to discuss about the Red and Blue pill concepts. Those who have seen the movie Matrix would be quite familiar with these terms ! However to give a brief background let me quote a few famous lines from the movie.

Morpheus describes the effects of the two pills to Neo

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Hi Everybody !

I hope you all had found my previous post worth reading… ! Well… This time I’m here with a new topic…. Its called Self Replicating Programs… Or in simple words, what we use to call them — Computer Virus !!

Before I proceed, let me just brief you about what exactly a virus is ! A computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without permission or knowledge of the user. The history of computer viruses dates back to 1949, when theories for self replicating programs were first developed. First “on the wild” virus came into existence in 1981. These viruses, named Apple Viruses 1,2 and 3 were found on Apple II operating system. Since then, viruses are evolving with time getting new enhancements each time. For a complete list of virus timeline, I suggest you to visit this site.

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Hi !

Today I’m going to discuss about MD5 Collision Attack. But before proceeding, I’ll just give a brief on the HAsh function. A “hash” (also called a “digest”, and informally a “checksum”) is a kind of “signature” for a stream of data that represents the contents. The closest real-life analog we can think is “a tamper-evident seal on a software package”: if you open the box (change the file), it’s detected.

So what is an MD5 Collision Attack and how is it constructed ?? Before going at this stage, let me first explain what hashing really means ! The very first point here is, to understand that hashing is NOT encryption. This is a common confusion, especially because all these words are in the category of “cryptography”, but it’s important to understand the difference. “Encryption” transforms data from a cleartext to ciphertext and back (given the right keys). Thus we see that “Encryption” is a two-way operation. Hashes, on the other hand, are stream of data into small digest, and it’s strictly a one way operation. All hashes of the same type – (this example shows the “MD5″ variety) – have the same size no matter how big the inputs are.

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