Items tagged with Passwords
These days, the old "when, not if" saying applies to websites getting hacked just as much as it does for the likelihood of getting into a car accident. LivingSocial is the latest site to fall victim to an attack, but the Amazon-backed company has clearly learned from the mistakes of others and rushed to get out in...
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Spammers are changing tactics, and Google is trying to get the word out. These days, the bad guys are using hijacked accounts to launch their scams. By now, spam filters can spot old-school spam mail with reliability, but it’s harder to snag emails that appear to be from your friends – both for the filter...
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There are some basic rules to follow when selecting a password. For example, while we're sure your significant other is a fine person, using their name as your password is a terrible idea. Same goes for your son's birthday. The object is to select a series of characters and symbols that's nigh impossible to guess, but it doesn't stop there....
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Most of us have dozens of passwords to remember, including for multiple email accounts, Google, Facebook, online banking and credit card accounts, services like Dropbox and Evernote, and on and on, and it’s simply a pain. It can be difficult to create a strong password that you’ll actually remember, and...
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Maybe it's because all the script kiddies are out of school for the summer, or perhaps there's something in the water that's to blame for the recent rash of hacker attacks. Whatever the reason, security breaches are once again starting to pile up. Following on the heels of a hack attack that compromised the passwords...
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Yesterday, there were rumors aplenty that around 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords were stolen and posted on a Russian hacker forum, where the poster presumably was looking for some help decrypting them. LinkedIn, by way of a blog post by CEO Vicente Silveira, has confirmed that at least some of the leaked passwords belong to LinkedIn accounts....
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Kudos to California's state Assembly for passing a bill that would make it illegal for employers to pry Facebook usernames and passwords from employees and potential job candidates. Assembly Bill 1844, sponsored by Assemblywoman Nora Campos (D-San Jose), would put all private content on social networks out of reach of...
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Whether true or not, Apple’s Mac OSX is typically perceived as being more secure than Windows. But according to Passware, Inc., a leading maker of password recovery and e-Discovery software for Federal and State agencies, law enforcement, and military organizations, among many other corporate clients, OSX has its fair share of vulnerabilities...
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Security firm Imperva, by examining 32 million passwords that were posted to the Internet after a security breach at RockYou.com, has come up with a list of the most common passwords chosen by consumers. The results are not pretty, except for hackers, as the most popular password is 123456.
It was bad enough that RockYou saw fit to store
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Googling your own name might not be such a narcissistic activity after all; in fact, it just must save you from identity theft. At least that's what Kevin Andreyo, a Wilkes University professor, discovered when he used the "deep web" search engine, Pipl, to see what information about him might be publicly available on the Internet. What he...
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Because of the computational power of today's GPUs, GPUs are starting to be harnessed more and more to help out CPUs with some hardcore number crunching. That is the concept behind Nvidia's CUDA, ATI's Stream, and Apple's OpenCL frameworks. There aren't many apps available yet that take advantage of these relatively new technologies, but the...
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The next time you are taking money out at the ATM, be wary of anyone lurking nearby with an antenna sticking out of their pants. They might be stealing your PIN wirelessly. A pair of Ph.D. students at the Security and Cryptography Laboratory (LASEC) of Switzerland's Ecole publique Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), recently demonstrated...
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