In January, 2007 TJX  Companies Inc, reported an incident of major breach of CCN and NAA records.  Data Loss DB reported that more than 94 million records were stolen by extremely sophisticated hackers who were able to bypass the data security used by the company.

The detailed news is available on the following link

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/14/tjx_hacking_suspect_arrested/

Sergey along with 10 other men were charged in August, 2008 for hacking into TJX network and stealing millions of credit card records.

1. Email alerts can be sent in the event of unauthorized device access on the usb ports
2. You can reset your installation password unlike the last version
3. Licensing options have been made more clear and easy

Download your free full version trial copy from here

Gradually you end up opening ports one by one. Sometimes you remember to block it back once you purposed for opening it is solved, and sometimes you just forget about it. What happens when the number of machines in your computer network is huge, something like more than 5000 windows machines or may be 10,000. In case of defense organization it definitely will be more than 25,000.

With the introduction of next generation portable devices, security of data in a computer network is supposed to go even worse. Think about tablet PCs and all sorts of portable devices claimed to be small and a version representing a transition from laptops and PDAs to something between laptops and PDAs.

US defense issued a policy to block all kinds of portable media devices like USB drives, memory sticks, SD Cards, Portable hard drives, thumb drives etc. The ban was issued in November 2008 by the U.S. Strategic Command after a virus, a variation of the SillyFDC worm, was found to be spreading through military networks by copying itself from one removable drive to another.

read more about this story here

Beta signups are already available on the company’s website, which soon would be updated to full version for regular business use. Click here to try the Beta version of the product.

According to an article published by searchsecurity,

“This model allows a company to reduce capital expenditures, scales up or add new networks under end point security protection on demand, and frees up the IT team from getting involved into huge amount of efforts required to maintain the server . The most compelling aspects of SaaS is its lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). According to McKinsey & Company, companies realise a 30% lower TCO when using a SaaS-based solution instead of an on premise solution. This value comes from several sources: reduced deployment time, no supporting infrastructure, no application testing, lower training requirements, no ongoing business process change management, all costs are visible in the service fee (no need to aggregate power and data center costs, licenses, pro rata allocations of infrastructure costs, etc …), and no unscheduled downtime.”

About the Product

uHook enterprise is a state of art DLP product for computer networks having enterprise data distributed in a WAN (Wide Area Network). uHook uses its ACTIVE EPS (End Point Security) technology, which was used in the first personal version of the award winning product, uHook Personal..

What is Active EPS?

ACTIVE EPS is the name give  to the core DLP engine in the agents which helps uhook detect and block any kind of malicious device which can be used to steal data. Besides, having its unique detection mechanism uHook Enterprise agents uses very low memory footprint, supports almost all windows versions including Vista and Windows 7 and interestingly communicates with the server without opening any port on your system making it less vulnerable unlike other desktop based application which communicates in the network. The product is based on both SaaS and non SaaS versions, which offer you limitless possibilities like controlling multiple office from one single admin console accessible from anywhere in the world, having unlimited capacity of storing your reports as long as you want and allowing you to scale up the control to over 2000 PCs with one single server license of uHook Enterprise.

Business Benefits:-

1. Control and monitor device access activities at different location of the globe sitting in one place
2. Protect your data and prevent malicious users with strong ACTIVE EPS technology
3. Scale up to thousands of machines within a very short time
4. No complex deployments and server installations are required
5. Unlimited storage of reports and policies
6. Regular updates of server and agents

Features:-

1. Easy to use device control over network
2. No port is opened on the agent thereby reducing the risk of other vulnerabilities
3. Password protected uninstall of the agents
4. Fast workflow of device control and policy implementation
5. Both SaaS based as well Dedicated Server support
6. SSL secured access of admin console
7. 128 bit encryption is used for client server communication
8. ACTIVE EPS technology ensures identification of a device uniquely out of millions of devices
9. Unlimited backup & storage of reports and policies
10. Regular updates of agents and servers
11. Flexible reporting
12. Email alerts and warnings of malicious activities on the end points

From the words of times of India:-

“On June 24, someone who goes by the name Praveen Rai walked out of two branch offices of State Bank of India in Mumbai, pocketing a cool Rs 90,000 that he had allegedly siphoned off the account of a Kolkata-based trader. The crime shook not only the businessman, but also the city’s police and e-fraud experts. For, the next target could be you. Or just about anyone doing e-banking. Police are desperately looking for Rai, who is believed to be in the early 30s. They also have a photograph of him (the one he submitted to open the SBI account), but more than a month after the crime, there is no trace of him. The victim, trader Akhilesh Bagla, is probably the first from the city to have had his account hacked. But it opens the risk of a racket operating in the web world. ”

Now, if we look into the incident closely, it turns out that at some point of time, the culprits had access to the bank account details of the victim including the internet banking id and password.

How did they get access to such information?

Either the victim himself gave them the information or the information came from somewhere else. It might be suspected that, an insider trading of confidential information happened. And a usb thumb drive could have been one of the tools used by the culprits to achieve their mission. The possibility of using an email could also not be ruled out. But, most of the businesses now a days use their own in-house emailing system along with monitoring all inbound and outbound emails.

Some of our so called IT security experts comment that “I think the bank account was hacked”.

But, there is a very simple logic to make you understand that any kind of hacking or network penetration was not attempted in this case. Why would a hacker take so much pain to gain access to the gateways of SBI, penetrate into the network and then, when he has access to all the bank accounts selects only one of them to steal some 2.6 Laks of money.

So, what we conclude now is that, there was loss of information somewhere which was only limited to a particular bank account which led to this incident. And , if we want to avoid such incidents to happen in future we need to fix all our security holes both at the network level and at the end points.

With increasing usage of different kinds of USB storage devices and uncountable number of cases of data theft through USB drives, products like uHook USB Disk Security are definitely going to go a long way in solving these problems. Besides, apart from internet, the second major source of virus spread is USB storage.We are in a world where we can’t just live without USB storage, to name a few, IPOD, Flash Drives, SD Cards, Digital Cameras, Cell Phones, external Hard drives are some of them and many more, waiting to flood the market very soon.

Not only uHook helps its users block all malicious/unknown usb devices, monitors all activities of file copy operation and blocks virus and worms by blocking autorun.inf, but the solution also blocks malicious users from uninstalling it. Because, whenever a person tries to uninstall it, he should have the password which is assigned only to the actual user who installed the application.

Besides, the solution is designed in such a way that any tempering with the install files or the software will render all the USB storage device completely blocked on the system until the administrator runs a fresh installation. There are a lot of vendors selling USB security solution, but each one of those miss out one thing or the other to provide a complete and perfect solution. Besides, none of these applications provide real value for money as the cost of these solutions are far above an end user can afford. Paying above 50 USDs is too much to ask for a USB security solution.
With perfect pricing(21 USD), small download size(around 1 MB) and all the features an end user wants in a USB Security product, uHook USB Security seems to be the most promising solution in the online marketplace for windows.

uHook Personal 2.1 Summary Screen

The award wining  “uHook Personal” generated so many downloads just within few days of its first release that, we were forced to release its next major upgrade “uHook Personal 2.1″ before scheduled time.

The product helps you protect your files and data from unauthorized access to USB Disks, Flash Drives, SD Card, IPODs, Digital Cameras, Cell Phones etc. uHook Personal is meant to be used for both the home users as well as corporates. A fully functional trial version of this application is available on the homepage of the publisher Dataresolve Technologies and all the top download websites. The full version can be purchased online from the publisher’s secure online store at plimus which accepts almost all credit cards, wire transfers and paypal.

The product received good appreciation from most of the top download online software archives and have been listed in all the top download websites including download.com, softpedia.com, upload.com and almost all the websites of CNET. The best part of the second version of uHook Perosnal 2.1 is that, it has been specially designed to work optimally on Windows Vista. Following is another screenshot of the installation of uHook on Windows Vista which was tested by Softpedia

uHook Personal 2.1 Settings Screen

uHook has a dependency of  .Net Framework 2.0 which needs to be installed before installing uHook. .Net framework can be downloaded from http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/6/7/567758a3-759e-473e-bf8f-52154438565a/dotnetfx.exe.
All windows Vista machines already have this framework installed. So, there is no need to install it on Vista machines. .Net framework will be needed only on windows XP machines. But, as most of the other application needs .Net Framework, so, there is a possibility that you might be having this framework already installed. Whatever the case may be, if uhook doesn’t find appropriate .Net framework installed on your machine, it will give you a pop up to install the framework and installation can be continued after you are done with .Net installation.

Following are some of the important features of uHook Personal:-

uHook Personal 2.0 Features
Unauthorized Access Blocking Completely blocks all kinds of unauthorized or unidentifiable USB storage device from your machine.

Multiple Device Blocking Monitor USB Drives, SD Cards, IPODS through USB, Cameras, Mobile Phones, External USB Hard Drives, External USB CD Drives insertions and confidential file copy operations.

User Activity Files Copied Reporting and Printing Selectively Monitor users for their file copy activities on USB storage devices.

Set your own Policy Set policies for blocking and monitoring mechanism depending on your requirement.

Takes Care of your data 24X7 Can stop others from copying your files even if you just leave your desktop\laptops open.

Simple user Experience Easy to use, install and do not need any prior software knowledge.

Less Resource Consumption uHook Personal uses very minimal system resoruce.

data loss