In a startling revelation, a Swedish hacker named Dan Egerstad of Deranged Security has just revealed that he has been able to hack 100 highly sensitive e-mail accounts owned by embassies of different countries including India, China, Russia, Pakistan. Not only that, he has been able to break the security wall of Indian Defence Academy (NDA) , Defence & Research Development Organization (DRDO). After hacking and posting about his achievement on his website, Mr. Egerstad has also given interview with leading Indian news-channel and offered to provide his contact details.

By nature, most brilliant hackers are egoistic and play with security arrangement of highly guarded sites just to have some fun. Dan Egerstad seems to be one of them as he has come out openly about it. His act seems to be intended to educate the self-contented officials who live in false guise of security whereas they forget that technology is changing each and every minute and they must keep pace with time. According to Dan, it all these sites have in secured POP (Post Office Protocol)

No need to mention how in secured these establishment might feel now. They would also feel a bit relieved because their sensitive data has not been taken away by their enemies or they have not lost anything through government espionage.

Network security has been a topic of extensive research for a long time. With newer technologies coming to the field and more intelligent hackers becoming active, providing security to our data is a never ending battle. Who could forget the two famous tales of Network security breach? Some unknown hackers stole the US government databases and then the Citibank lost $10 millions because of a group of fraud hackers. With exponential growth of internet and networking, online security and network security have become more essential when a computer is connected to a public network like the Internet. Because, all the data transmitted in this process is exposed to possible hackers and thus are vulnerable.

The factors that influence the mechanisms used for securing data on networks include many aspects. They are the network’s architecture, security components, security administration setup and network security awareness in the organization.

Network security, including privacy of data or messages transmitting, should provide four services- viz. authentication of communicating parties, integrity of data, non-repudiation, and appropriate authorization. In fact, these are the objectives or the goals a network security system.

Two parties participating in a communication across a particular computer network would also want protection from the secret eavesdropper. The sender and receiver demand confidentiality, i.e. the transmitted messages make sense to only the sender and receiver. This is achieved through cryptography.

Some form of media carries data from one destination to another. The media may be telephone lines, satellite or microwaves but these Medias can easily be accessed by anyone to read the transmitted data. This problem is tackled by ‘cryptography’. The word, ‘cryptography’ in Greek means secret writing. Cryptography is at the heart of network security. It is something like codes used by intelligence agencies for various combing operations. This technology of cryptography has been used in history of right from Roman Times to the Second World War and more recently from the cold war days to the age of information superhighway.

Let us explain the basic principal of cryptography in very simple words. In cryptography, the original data or massage at the source is encrypt or encode using well defined algorithms and then decrypt or decode the cipher text to plaintext at the destination using a reverse algorithm. These encryption and decryption algorithms are referred to as ciphers. The ciphers are public and it can be available to anyone, but the keys are secret. The encrypting algorithm produces a different cipher text with a different key, which adds to another layer of security, therefore the malicious person will need to know the key.

Network security looks to be a simple term. It is also very appealing to all of us but this term carries a lot of meaning and there are various facets of network security. Perhaps there is no absolute definition of the term network security because the concept of network security will differ according to the security policy of the user or the organization.