Latest Security News | SecurityExtra.com

| author: programming

Latest Security News | SecurityExtra.com

Posted: 30 Jul 2011 01:33 PM PDT

Smartphones now represent nearly a third of all mobile sales, with Android rapidly closing on the number one spot. One of the things that makes Android smartphones so attractive is the openness of the Android operating system. Users, for example, can benefit from the high number of apps and free apps written for Android phones. However, because Android is not a closed, structured environment, like that of competitors such as Apple, but an open environment, there have been many security issues. Android apps are not checked by Google before being sold on Android Market and this has created security problems. The Guardian recently reported that 50 Android apps from Android Market were found to be infected with rootkit malware called DroidDream, which could compromise personal data, taking over the user's device, although Google acted swiftly to remove the apps from the market once it had been alerted. More recently, a security flaw was discovered in the operating system, where certain Google account authentication tokens being sent over the air unencrypted were potentially putting users at risk, if they were sending data over public Wi-Fi networks. Again, Google issued a fix, but recurring security episodes give users serious cause for concern. [...]

How to hide ip: What VPN solution for my smartphone?

| author: programming

How to hide ip: What VPN solution for my smartphone?

What VPN solution for my smartphone?

Posted: 30 Jul 2011 12:20 AM PDT

From the previous articles, we always considered that, as a user, you connect through a VPN connection via a computer, whether it runs Linux, Mac OsX or Windows. Truth to be told, most of mobile users are now relyng on their mobile phone, and especially smartphone, for most of their daily tasks. So let’s take a deeper look at the VPN solutions that are available for smartphone users.

The difficult part when dealing with smartphones is that there is a plethora of operating systems and devices available. Blackberry runs the Blackberry OS; Apple have its iOS for iPhone/iPod/iPad/apple TV; Samsung is still balanced between Bada and Android while HTC plays btween Android and Windows Phone; Nokia still sticks with Symbian OS … Then you have the other devices that may have their own proprietary OS, or who try to make smart move by using some popular OS: Android, Windows Phone, Symbian or Bada …. This doesn’t make the choice easier, does it? I’m not even referring to the different versions of each operating system.

On the other hand, different VPN solutions also exist, and they all evolve around standard protocols such as PPTP, OpenVPN, … Things are getting fuzzier, aren’t they? How the heck are you going to mix all these options so as to get some VPN service running?

The good thing is that due to standard protocols, most of the smartphone OS are now implementing a native VPN layer. As of today, while most security expert agree that it is not the strongest VPN option, most devices implement the PPTP protocol. What does this mean for a smartphone user who want to use a VPN connection?

This actually means that the lucky smartphone user has to find a VPN solution provider that can give him PPTP credentials and server to connect to. Luckily, almost all VPN provider has a solution for it. In fact, most of those service provider. So, as a smartphone user, you need to gather the following informations so as to be able to correctly configure your VPN connection:

VPN server/gateway: this usually is given to you as an IP address, or as a FQDN (fully qualified domain name). An example can be: xxx.xxvpn.com
VPN credentials: this usually means a username and the associated password. Be careful on this one, as some solution providers regularly renew those credentials, though making the ones you got obsolete after some time
Encryption: check if the provider requires encryption

Once you got those prerequisite informations, follow your smartphone manual to find out how to properly configure and test your VPN connection.

Tell us more about your experience with regards to VPN and smartphone in the comment section of this article.

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What VPN solution for my smartphone?

How to hide ip: My Adventure to Accessing Spotify via a VPN service

| author: programming

How to hide ip: My Adventure to Accessing Spotify via a VPN service

My Adventure to Accessing Spotify via a VPN service

Posted: 27 Jul 2011 02:50 AM PDT

If you are a bit connected to social media (even if you don’t), I’m sure you’ve heard about Spotify – this online music streaming service that is only available for users in Finland, France, Norway, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and the US (at least by the time of this writing). If you’re not in one of those countries, you won’t be able to listen for free to great music (they also have premium accounts, though). That’s too bad, especially when Spotify claims to have 13 millions music available for listening, and we’re not talking about indie artists, they have big guys and gals on their list, if we only mention Beyoncé and Coldplay (just had a glance on their home page).

So you know that I am located in a place that is not part of those lucky countries. You are in the same situation too, I guess – otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this article.

But anyway, I’m just thinking that if a VPN can have me pretend that I am in New Jersey, I guess there must be a way that I can tell spotify that I’m in the US too … So let’s do it.

I launched my VPN client, then I got a US IP address. Now I can create a free spotify account. So I process, and … oops, I need to get an invitation code. While being a bit skeptical, I applied for being put on the waiting list of people who want to have an invitation to spotify.

I then browsed the internet looking for some invitation code that people may have put on forums, but, as you may guess, they are all used-invite that are worthless.

Trying to be a bit smarter, I tweeted if some people would give me a #spotify (please notice the use of the hashtag), I had two unknown people who answered me that they could give me an invite. But the trouble happened when it came to sending the invite as they requested my e-mail address. I didn’t want to give my e-mail address (well, I could have created a temporary one, but I was a bit lazy doing so), and those guys couldn’t DM me the invite, neither could I DM them as they aren’t following me on twitter – so it was a dead end (well, I could have been a bit insisting, and share a temporary address on twitter, but I didn’t want to be seen as an irresponsible twitter user who share his e-mail address to the public)

Anyway, less than one week after I applied to the waiting list, ….surprise! I received my official spotify invite. Great.

So I launched again my VPN client, got a US-based IP address, then clicked on the spotify invite link, created my account, downloaded the spotify client and …. I could listen to the whole album of “3 doors down” that they just released a few days ago …. Ain’t ~~life~~ VPN great? Yeah, I’ve got a Junk of the heart, and I’m happy.

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My Adventure to Accessing Spotify via a VPN service

Payday loans online hub

| author: programming

The paydayloansonlinehub.com understands that life can be unpredictable. Unforeseen circumstances and unexpected expenses can make you money trouble. paydayloansonlinehub.com provides more money in the short-term solutions so that you are in a position to get back on the road to monetary security and success, application procedure fully takes only minutes to complete. Once your information has been approved, you will be in a position to access their money the day after the company, the goal is to help the paydayloansonlinehub all working people who want an easy and fast to handle the needs of cash on the same day all achievable without any need to leave the comfort and privacy of your home. Household bills, the short-term needs and emergency expenses can be easily manipulated through Payday loans. Keep in mind that it is important to use payday loans only as a short-term financial solution and never as a long-term. The amount of money you can borrow depends on your credit score and your ability to repay the loan. paydayloansonlinehub with the whole process of acquiring payday loans is fast and easy and allows you to target your efforts to resolve their temporary solution has the best paydayloansonlinehub.com - payday loans online , Many people experience occasional moments when payday is far away, and they need some extra money to get by until then. Perhaps the car breaks down, a family member makes an unexpected visit to the doctor, a utility bill is higher than normal incident occurs or some other expensive and can not be deferred until later. If something happens, the only solution may be to get a loan, so you can take care of urgent business. A conventional loan is sometimes difficult to obtain, especially for people who do not have a good credit history or security sufficient to guarantee that they will pay the loan, all payday loans allow you to enjoy instant money in less than 24 hours and you can spend the money anyway you like. While his is able to qualify for a payday loan and you meet all the requirements you can expect that the money is transferred to your bank account the same day. Services we offer are understood as a form of short-term to solve the financial problems that you can pay when you receive your next paycheck, no launch applications, fax or waiting for banks to respond. A payday loan is wrapped up quickly in the short form online. In most cases, you will get an immediate response. When you complete your application make sure you provide accurate details to speed up direct deposit your loan as do many other people have done and come to you too payday loans online - paydayloansonlinehub.com .

Spyware Techie

| author: programming

Spyware Techie

Avast Enhanced Protection Mode Removal Guide

Posted: 27 Jul 2011 06:41 AM PDT

Do you know what Avast Enhanced Protection Mode is? Avast Enhanced Protection Mode is a type of rogue antispyware application that pretends to be a part of the legitimate Avast computer security...

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Spyware Techie

| author: programming

Spyware Techie

Ultimate Scan Removal Guide

Posted: 26 Jul 2011 02:07 AM PDT

Do you know what Ultimate Scan is? Even expert users are finding it increasingly more difficult to distinguish between genuine security tools and rubbish rogue antispyware applications like Ultimate...

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Unlimited Defender Removal Guide

Posted: 26 Jul 2011 02:04 AM PDT

Do you know what Unlimited Defender is? Unlimited Defender is a malicious application that is trying to settle in your computer under the pretense that it can provide you with the best system...

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How to hide ip: Free VPN Service – Ultra VPN

| author: programming

How to hide ip: Free VPN Service – Ultra VPN

Free VPN Service – Ultra VPN

Posted: 26 Jul 2011 02:10 AM PDT

Passing Thoughts – UltraVPN is only for nerds who can play with technical aspects of OpenVPN service as UltraVPN herself does not seem to hide your IP address. It can be used for basic Internet surfing, nothing more!

In my ongoing quest to create a list of free VPN services, I plan to write about the ones that are easy to setup and work smoothly. This article will focus on Ultra VPN which looks like an appreciable free VPN service though it has its disadvantages.

During the launch of Ultra VPN the founders were smart to use free OpenVPN technology instead of PPTP to power their VPN service. OpenVPN has always been considered as more secure when compared to PPTP based VPN services. UltraVPN has a small list of servers that are spread around France and USA. Also, please be aware that UltraVPN performs no server switching.

OpenVPN has been widely criticized for cases where it is not able to avoid drops in Internet connections. This makes OpenVPN highly unreliable and prone to data loss. Though UltraVPN’s privacy policy is well defined yet most of the time they use France based servers and not US based servers as you might expect from a VPN service.

Your account is active the moment you register with UltraVPN. A standard OpenVPN software distributed by OpenVPN is installed on your machine so as to use the services of UltraVPN. Users can relax as UltraVPN won’t install anything other then the already trusted OpenVPN software. UltraVPN uses the standard OpenVPN application with no modifications whatsoever.

Cons of UltraVPN:

The service does not has multiple IP addresses in its pool thus most of the time you might end up using the same IP address. This does not makes sense as anyone can figure out that the traffic source is coming via UltraVPN’s servers.
The services does not hide your IP on the first place. UltraVPN uses OpenVPN services with zero modifications thus it makes no extra efforts to hide your IP address. You ISP can easily find your original IP address thus pushing you into unwanted risks.
It does not perform server switching so in case people want multiple countries as their source then they got to depend on multiple plans.
No automatic start up.
I don’t think they will offer any form of support as their forum page was a broken php code. You will figure out nothing!

Salman Siddiqui is an expert technology analyst. His vast experience of freelance writing is backed by his passion to swim against the tide. You can grab him on Twitter.

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Free VPN Service – Ultra VPN

How to hide ip: Types of Proxy Servers

| author: programming

How to hide ip: Types of Proxy Servers

Types of Proxy Servers

Posted: 25 Jul 2011 07:04 AM PDT

We all know what proxy servers are and for those who don't, these are special types of servers that act as intermediaries between your home computer and the rest of the Internet effectively protecting your IP privacy. There are several types of proxy servers available on the net and having some basic knowledge about them will help you determine what you want and how to get it done.

Transparent Proxies

These proxies do not provide any IP protection and are simply used to speed up your browsing experience. They cache websites allow you to quickly go back to a site you visited earlier. If you are looking to hide your IP to the outside world, stay clear of these proxies.

Anonymous Proxies

These types of proxies provide some reasonable anonymity for most users. However, they identify themselves publicly as proxies while hiding your original IP address. This means that while using anonymous proxy, it may be difficult to track to you but eventually, you could be tracked.

Distorting Proxies

As the name suggests, these proxies will provide an incorrect IP address that is displayed on the http headers. They will effectively hide your original IP address.

Elite Proxies

These are highly anonymous proxy servers that do no identify themselves publicly as proxies. They provide maximum privacy on the Internet since they both hide their own identification while at the same time conceal your original IP address.

Most public proxies are slow and not very safe. Very fast elite proxies come at a fee.

The most preferred way to connect to a fast proxy is to use IP hiding software which automatically configures your browser to use an elite proxy. Most of these software applications will hide your IP by changing your IP and your country providing anonymity.

Always check your IP before connecting to a proxy and after connecting to make sure that you are running behind a proxy. Many websites, including this website, offer tools to help you determine if you are anonymous or you are publicly visible.

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Types of Proxy Servers

How to hide ip: Hiding Local IP Addresses

| author: programming

How to hide ip: Hiding Local IP Addresses

Hiding Local IP Addresses

Posted: 23 Jul 2011 11:04 PM PDT

Can private local area network addresses be hidden and allow employees to access the Internet anonymously? This is especially important if you want to avoid external users from initiating conversation with employees or users located on the internal network while still allowing Internet access. This is where masquerade NAT comes to the rescue. Masquerade NAT enables multiple IP addresses to be identified as a single IP address on an internal network.

To use masquerade NAT, you need to specify the range of addresses that need to be translated by NAT. The translated IP addresses replace the source IP addresses on the IP header on all IP packets. A temporary port number replaces the IP source port number if it is available.

Set the MAXCON high enough to accommodate multiple conversations for each PC. The default is usually 128 but it can be set to any preferred value.

Set a HIDE rule statement by specifying the TIMEOUT which determines the time for conversations between the server and the personal computer located on the network. This value determines the waiting period before a response is received and is set to the default value of 16.

Always enable IP forwarding when using NAT by setting the IP datagram verification to YES under the TCP/IP attributes.

In masqueraded networks, only the PCs located inside the network can initiate a conversation or request. For example, a web browser on a PC can access a website while a web browser outside the masqueraded network cannot access a resource located inside the network. To enable 2-way communication, a feature called port forwarding or static NAT is used where administrators configure the translation tables to allow permanent access to resources located inside the masqueraded network.

Give careful attention to the details when implementing a network address translation (NAT) since it can have serious drawbacks on the quality of an Internet connection.

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Hiding Local IP Addresses

How to hide ip: Is a Free VPN Safe?

| author: programming

How to hide ip: Is a Free VPN Safe?

Is a Free VPN Safe?

Posted: 22 Jul 2011 12:28 AM PDT

In one of the series of article I wrote about FreeUSvpn.com free VPN service, one of the commenters asked if it’s safe to use this service. I’m going to bring my two cents to this critical question – and rather than answer for the particular VPN service quoted above, I’d like to address this in a broader point of view.

So let’s consider a VPN service. How does it actually work? Let’s just take a simplified vision:

- You chose a VPN provider – let’s say xxVPN.com,

- You are then usually given credentials and a software for connecting through the VPN. On a basic package, your operating systems already comes with a VPN client software – you only have to configure it properly provided that you have all the needed information (the protocols used, the encryption supported, …). I’m not going to get into the details of the protocols for encrypting whether it is for the header or for the body of the IP packet,

- On some more elaborate VPN packages, the provider will give you an additional software that eases the installation and configuration process. This usually is a proprietary software,

- Then you use your credentials to setup the VPN connection. This VPN actually is a kind of tunnel where all your traffic goes through before reaching the internet/intranet. On the same time, it “impersonates” you by giving you a temporary IP address that will be visible by the whole internet – though “hiding” your actual IP address

- All your internet traffic then goes through this one single tunnel.

Now let’s see this whole process from a safety point of view and bring some elements of answers to the question raised on the title of this article. I’m going to ask you to answer the following questions first:

- To what degree would you trust a third-party provider that you barely know who promises you some kind of security by asking you to route all your traffic through their unknown tunnel?

- How do you actually check if all your traffic are actually encrypted?

- How do you ensure that your traffic are actualy strongly encrypted so that no man-in-the-middle would be able to sniff it and decrypt it easily?

- Would you conduct a private transaction (let’s say bank-related transaction for example) by going through a third party provider that you haven’t done any business before and that still needs to earn your trust?

Check your answers, and if you are hesitating for any of those questions, then I’d recommend you not use those services for any privacy-concern-related activities you’d do on the internet.

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Is a Free VPN Safe?

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