iBlog: Nishit Shah

Annus mirabilis noun. latin meaning a remarkable/wonderful year. What a great year 2007 has been. Have enjoyed every moment of it. Of course there were many highs and lows for me but overall it was a great year by taking material, physical, spiritual and social prosperity. Enjoyed my work throughout the year and had fun doing it. Also, got promoted at work on the way Took timely breaks from work and had some some of the best time of the year while hanging out with family and friends. Got an opportunity to read some really good books, saw some great movies and met many interesting people. Didn’t stop learning and learned a bit of shell scripting, loads of Linux commands, better system administering skills, speed reading, very little French, couple of cords in Guitar…. Looking forward to complete what I have started with Also, its been little more than a year of blogging for me. I am happy that my blog has survived for a year now with 75 posts after couple of failed attempts. (I just want my grand children to know about me after reading my blog what I was upto .. few decades down the line )

Looking forward for a great year ahead…am working on my wishlist and new year resolutions.

ps. Named the title from the new latin word that I learned today from Anu Garg’s book A Word a Day - A Romp Through Some of the Most Unusual and Intriguing Words in English.

Its not often that I pick up a book only after reading its title. Its just the name and the summary on the back cover that prompted me to buy this book. This book is a memoir by Michael Gates Gill of is riches to rags journey from a high-level advertising executive with JWT to a barista (refers to one who has acquired some level of expertise in the preparation of espresso-based coffee drinks) at Starbucks.

The story is about Mike who is a Yale Graduate and is working with JWT for more than two decades. He has it all, money, fame, family and then suddenly one day his life turns haywire when he is fired from his job. So, at 63 he is between the devil and the deep blue sea. He is unemployed, his family life is ruined, has an unexpected newborn and if that was not all, a not so serious ear tumor. Its very difficult to make ends meet for him as his new business fails to trigger. Surprisingly his life changes again when he accidentally lands up with a job in one of the Starbucks cafe where he used to sit and enjoy his lattes.

An interesting Sunday afternoon read. Personally I liked the book except for the parts where he talks about how good his previous life was.

PS: Check out the ads created by JWT . Some are really cool ! If you are like me who like creative thinking

A movie starring Tom Hanks is being made from this book. Watch out for that !

Took an extended weekend break from work prior to the new year and am off with my friends to Lonavala tonite and tomo at Pune. Hope to catch up with old friends. Will be back on Sunday.

Found (googled) this cool command which lists all the installed Perl Modules.

perl -MCPAN -e ‘print CPAN::Shell->r ‘

Spent a wonderful Sunday afternoon, installed Fedora Core 8 on my system. So, now its triple boots with Ubuntu 7.10, Open Solaris 10 and Fedora Core 8. Also, the 10th anniversary version of nmap is out now. The latest version 4.50 include the Zenmap GUI, 2nd generation OS detection techniques, advanced TCP / IP traceroute functionality among others. Will upgrade to the latest version and try it out today.

I was traveling in a Volvo coming back from Pune to Bombay (which is almost 3.5 hours journey)after attending ClubHack and they started playing Om Shanti Om on the small TV set kept in the Bus. I am not even a small fan of Bollywood movies and don’t make efforts to watch them. Don’t find them appealing at all. I keep myself satisfied with the movies coming from Hollywood. I was _FORCED_ to see the movie because I was sitting right in front and the speakers were exactly on my head. Not something that I had planned for. After watching the movie for like 20-30 minutes I realized it was all crap. The story made no sense at all. It seemed everyone was overacting. I tried hard to change my place but in vain. Somehow I managed to shut my eyes and put on my earfones to play some music. I was out of luck, I had just couple of songs on my cell, as I wanted to change my playlist after listening to the same songs in Bangalore, but in hurry, I managed to only remove the songs and couldn’t transfer any because of lack of time I would remember this day when I was listening to the same 2 songs for almost 3 hours. Du hast by Rammstein and Turn the Page by Metallica helped me to kill my time. I believe I must have listened to the same 2 songs atleast 20 times each that evening !

Feel pity for those ppl who actually spent money to see such crap movie !

I was almost about to miss this event! But somehow got up from the bed early enough in the morning to make it on time. I had returned home late from Bangalore as my flight got delayed by an hour. Reached home at around midnight and had to catch a 5am bus to Pune to reach there on time. I was very tired to get up at 4 am and get ready but somehow managed to do it and reached there on time With topics like Hacking one’s Firefox to steal his web secrets, Mining Digital Evidence in Microsoft Windows, 7 years of Indian IT act , etc and an opportunity to meet and network with some of the best Indian Hackers, this was an event not worth missing. This event was organized by Rohit Srivastwa. a renowned cyber security specialist. The speakers / topic of talks / venue / delegates .. everything was too good. I had gone with my ex- Katalyst colleague Ameya

The event started with Rohit introducing all the speakers of the event. The first talk that I attended was Sunil Arora on Backdoor 2.0: Hacking Firefox to steal his web secrets. He showed in detail about techniques to write a malware for Firefox to steal a victim’s web secrets like username, password, credit card number etc. He also talked about the recently discovered vulnerabilities in Firefox and how one can exploit them to push the malware to victim’s Firefox remotely. The session was very informative.

The next session was by Chetan Gupta on Mining Digital Evidence in Microsoft Windows. He showed us how forensic analysis was done on Windows system and how the cyber crime sleuths are able to recover all th details from a system at the time of investigation. Chetan Gupta is a very well known security expert working with Symantec Corporation and the best part was his introduction. He had almost a dozen security certificates under his belt. So, it took like almost 5 minutes to complete his introduction by the comparer and everyone started clapping soon after his intro. I am pasting a part of it here.

Chetan Gupta is a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Sciences from AIUMT, USA and has done his Masters of Science in Computer Networks. He has vast experience in the field of Information Security with a focus on the domain of penetration testing and digital forensics. He is well-versed with the Incident response and Computer Forensics standards and methodology, has a good understanding of the Cyber law & has led teams on Computer Forensic assignments for many multinational clients. He has also conducted penetration tests and risk assessment exercises for a multitude of international clients. Chetan Gupta is an Encase Certified Examiner (EnCE), SANS GIAC Certified Forensics Analyst (GCFA), SANS GIAC Certified Intrusion Analyst (GCIA), Master in Computer Forensics (US), Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH), CIW Certified Security Associate and Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA).

phew…
The next talk was one of the most interesting one by Rohas Nagpal who is the President of the Asian School of Cyber Law. where he talked about the 7 most prominent cyber crime cases in India including the controversial Avnish Bajaj case of Baazee.com. There was so much to learn about the Indian IT act from him. Most of the things that I was not aware of. He also talked about piracy, pornography, etc.

Then headed for lunch break and attended sessions on Crazy Toaster: Can Home Devices turn against us? and Hacking Web 2.0 and then headed for the panel discussion with Cyber Crime Lawyers, Hackers and Cops. This was the most impressive discussion on Cyber Crimes, powerful Indian laws and the security. I cleared many of my doubts which were never cleared by anyone.

Overall an amazing event. Headed back to Bombay soon after the event.
Looking forward to be a part of ClubHACK2008 !