Posted by: Aamir Attaa on September 29, 2008 at 3:30 AM
I have done plenty of posts regarding privacy issues related to cellular phones, and how they can be crucial if your personal information is handed over to undesired hands. Today, I am going to discuss another very sensitive issue that can add un-ending miseries to your life.
Problem
Problem is very simple, that is, if I am a postpaid customers, anyone can call my cellular company’s helpline, and can alter my billing address’ information after providing my CNIC number, home address and other basic information.
Now what will happen if my billing address is changed? Very simple, my bills will be delivered at new (and undesired) address. Hence, any one can have my call details.
In case you are getting e-statement for your postpaid bill, then scenario can get worst.
Offender can change my billing address again, after he/she has received my previous one month’s calling record. And this way, I will not even know the privacy breach that just happened.
Case Studies
Recently I met this person (I am not disclosing his identity on his request). He is a lawyer by profession and had a Mobilink postpaid number. His wife wanted to spy his phone activity. She achieved this by changing his billing address information to a new address where she had easy access.
She used to call several times a day to Mobilink helpline to figure out most inexperienced (innocent) CSR in the team, which she found one. After few days, she called again and asked for that particular CSR by name, on which she came online with her. Here, she asked this CSR (who was a lady too) to change the billing address of this postpaid number. She provided all information that was required. And her mission was achieved.
All of you can image about what would had happened next…
In another case reported to me was a person whose email (that was associated with Ufone postpaid number) got changed. And offender kept on receiving his bill via email for several months.
Continue Reading This Story
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Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 28, 2008 at 9:55 AM
Many times in my life I found myself in a situation when my DVD writer stopped reading a very important CD or DVD. I am sure all of you may have seen such a irritating situation when you find no other way but to curse your CD or DVD.
Okay don’t do that anymore, because there is a solution called Copy Cat 2.0. Yes, this is an application that can recover data from your scratched CDs and DVDs. Frankly speaking, I just tested this software, and it worked great.
Remember that a physically damaged disk area cannot be copied from CD or DVD in any case. What Copy Cat does in such a situation is that if such damaged area comes between a big file then Copy Cat skips the bytes which are not readable from file and copies all other bytes.
So don’t claim that it is not copying all of your data, but I assure you that this software is going to give you back the maximum amount of data from your badly damaged CD or DVD. Another plus is that Copy Cat can also copy data from hard disk area which is partially not readable.
Unlike Windows copy operation it does not stop the copy if bad area found. It is compatible with XP and Vista and above all, it is a freeware.
Download Copy Cat from Official Site
Download Copy Cat from Rapidshare
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Posted by: Aamir Attaa on August 9, 2008 at 8:26 AM
It often happens that we are interested in knowing the approximate location (city name at least) of the person who have sent you an email on your Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail account.
Well, many may not know, but yes you can have the city name of the sender using certain information that comes with your email. When you receive an email, you receive more than just the message.
The email comes with headers (that are normally not displayed in the message) that carry important information that can tell where the email was sent from and possibly who sent it. For that, you would need to find the IP address of the sender. Okay let’s start learning on how you can find the IP address of the sender.
Finding IP address With Gmail
- Log into your Gmail account with your username and password.
- Now open any email from your inbox (or the one you want to track the location)
- On the left side of the To panel, click on down arrow button, that will open a drop down menu.
- Click on “Show Original”
- A New window will open, which will have plenty of raw material. Don’t get confused here…! try to find out following line
- Look for “Received: from” Received: from [69.138.30.1] by web4587.mail.***.yahoo.com
- [69.138.30.1] can be different for every mail, as this is the IP address of the sender.
- You may find more than one Received: from patterns, in that case select the last one.
- Now that you have an IP address, you can locate this IP address by puting it in who.is
- open www.who.is and enter this ip address without brackets
- the query will give you the city name of the sender…!
Finding IP address with Yahoo
- Log into your Yahoo! mail with your username and password.
- Click on Inbox or whichever folder you have stored your mail.
- Open the mail that you want to track back.
- If you do not see the headers above the mail message, your headers are not displayed. To display the headers
- Click on Options on the top-right corner
- In the Mail Options page, click on General Preferences
- Scroll down to Messages where you have the Headers option
- Make sure that Show all headers on incoming messages is selected
- Click on the Save button
- Go back to the mails and open that mail
- You should see similar headers like above
- Look for Received: from followed by the IP address between square brackets [ ]. Here, it is 202.65.138.109.
- That is be the IP address of the sender.
- If there are many instances of Received: from with the IP address, select the IP address in the last pattern. If there are no instances of Received: from with the IP address, select the first IP address in X-Originating-IP.
- 7. Track the IP address of the sender
Finding IP address in Hotmail
- Log into your Hotmail account with your username and password.
- Click on the Mail tab on the top.
- Open the mail.
- If you do not see the headers above the mail message, your headers are not displayed. To display the headers,
- Click on Options on the top-right corner
- In the Mail Options page, click on Mail Display Settings
- In Message Headers, make sure Advanced option is checked
- Click on Ok button
- Go back to the mails and open that mail
- You should see the email headers now.
- If you find a header with X-Originating-IP: followed by an IP address, that is the sender’s IP address Hotmail headers. In this case the IP address of the sender is [68.34.60.59].
- Look for Received: from followed by IP address within square brackets[
- In this case, the IP address of the sender is [69.140.7.58].
- Or else if you have headers like this
- Look for Received: from followed by IP address within square brackets[].
- In this case, the IP address of the sender is [61.83.145.129] (Spam mail).
- 10. If you have multiple Received: from headers, eliminate the ones that have proxy.anyknownserver.com.11. Track the IP address of the sender
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