Skeletons in Hyderabad's cyber-closet - PART ONE?
04/11/2009 Written by Roberto Preatoni
Once upon a time, back in year 2003 the Indian newspaper The Times of India published a strange article titled “Hackers strike sites at will, govt helpless”
The story was about an American hacker (named Derren Warren, the name in the article was changed by his request) hired by an undisclosed security company located in Hyderabad. The manager of this company asked Derren to perform hacking activites against India’s critical government servers, being this job covered by a regular penetration test contract. Derren diligently performed the assigned tasks, successfully compromising several servers and as a proof of success he downloaded from those servers a lot of critical data.
But later on…
click on the news title to read more…
E2-labs, the long lasting saga
03/11/2009 Written by Roberto Preatoni
The long lasting, Bollywood’s favorite saga between E2-labs and Zone-H is far away from being finished. For those heart-breaking soap-operas addicted, we have more bits and bytes of today’s India’s hot topic with *special* multimedia effects. Welcome to the Web 2.0 world!
To discover the reason of this picture, click on the news title to read more…
Answer to E2-lab's website post
03/11/2009 Written by Roberto Preatoni
We aknowledge E2-lab’s post (reported in bold beneath) on their website homepage, here is our answer:
Let me come to the point. I write to you with utmost grief as I read couple of days back a post in a website (www.zone-h.org) defaming E2-Labs.
Dear Mr. Qureshey, we don’t defame anyone. We just stated the facts. Don’t play surprised about Zone-H’s last posts, you have been warned during the last months several times. Such posts are the natural result of your unethical business practices.
Let me put forth some of the facts before you one by one.
1.You mentioned and claimed in your post that we did not distribute the certificates to the corporate training participants. This is absolutely false since you are as well aware that the three programs such as hands on Hacking unlimited, Hands on Web application security and hands on wireles security certificates offered were ready but not signed hence could not be distributed. Further, out of three sets one set was distributed and two sets still awaiting your signature, and I believe it’s unethical practice that Zone-h did not sign inspite of you receiving complete payment. When asked about the signature you assured me that you will be coming back to India very soon and hence will sign it then.
Let me answer to you with the uttermost technical terms in my knowledge: BULLSHIT
The things are in the way we say. In fact being your company the organizer of the course, if we didn’t really sign the certificates why didn’t you sign them by yourself? You had all the rights to do so. The truth is that you scammed your students, period.
continue reading…
More on the E2-Labs scam
29/10/2009 Written by Roberto Preatoni
With the previous article, we explained that the E2-labs company located in Hyderabad (India) is currently selling security trainings using Zone-H’s image, logos, material without permission to unaware students.
We are currently receiving emails from enraged students who, for example, attended such courses and never got a diploma/certificate in exchange. In particular, even those students who attended the first and only round of courses (Hands on Hacking, Web-apps and Wireless) genuinely held by Zone-H teachers (having Mr. Roberto Preatoni and Mr. Gerardo Di Giacomo as teachers) are complaining about that. To all those students who participated to such courses, we want to say that Mr. Zaki Qureshey, asked us to sign all the diplomas (for each of the three courses and for each of the students, but without putting the student’s name on them). At the end of the training sessions, he asked us to distribute the diplomas of one of the three courses to the attending students, in order to be able to make some “ceremonial pictures” but he also asked us NOT TO DISTRIBUTE the diploma of the other two courses, he would have done it by himself later on.
The suspect now is that he never handed over such diplomas (again, we signed them with no students names on them) in order to be able to give them to other students, maybe at the end of a FAKE Zone-H course organized later on by himself using our brand and material without permission.
To all of those who incurred in such scam we ask to mail us sending all possible details of it.
Click on the news title to read more…
[updated] Zone-H statement on security trainings offered by E2-labs.com
27/10/2009 Written by Roberto Preatoni
This is an official statement in which Zone-H.org declares that has NOTHING TO DO with those hands on hacking classes offered by the Indian company named e2-labs (www.e2-labs.com).
WE ARE SORRY TO SAY THAT ALL THOSE STUDENTS WHO ATTENDED ZONE-H LABELED COURSES OFFERED BY COMPANY E2-LABS IN THE LAST 24 MONTHS HAVE BEEN SCAMMED!!!
The facts:
Zone-H and E2labs indeed entered into an agreement in year 2007 so that Zone-H would have had to provide first-class security training within the Indian territory. Right after entering into the agreement, Mr. Zaki Qureshey the E2-lab CEO organized a single seminar session in which Zone-H provided training to some of E2-labs students.
Before entering into the agreement, Zone-H was warned by other renowned security professionals who formerly offered services to E2-labs that such company had the very bad habit not to pay for the rendered service and to misuse the name and brands of those with whom was cooperating.
We had a taste of this when Mr. Qureshey organized a press conference in which was announcing our partnership during which, without being previously informed, we discovered that behind the press-release table it was displayed a huge banner with E2-labs and Zone-H logos (which was fine) but also those logos and names of Zone-H partners (the list was supposedly taken from our website) that had nothing to do with E2-labs nor with our agreement (one for all: insecure.org).
click on the news title to continue reading…