Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by suzie on February 5, 2014 at 11:47am

Looks interesting Robert .. Will be listening :)

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Robert Carobene on February 5, 2014 at 12:00pm

Thank You Susie it will be a great so hopefully we can help many people with computer security and the nsa

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by opt˟ on February 5, 2014 at 4:46pm

Originally, password crackers were fairly easy tools to gather millions of accounts with, for people used common passwords, such as "password" or simply their first name, or their firstname1.

There are a few different cracking tiers. For mass bulk cracking you might try the top 5 most common passwords per account before giving up. For deep bulk cracking you might try 20-100 passwords per account. For targeted you try to attempt a list of like 30,000-100,000 passwords and if that fails, you hit up every permutation possible, which is billions and billions. Eventually you hit limits from CPU and network speed, or the target machine, making the attempts per second finite so it can take hours, days, or weeks to crack, depending on what you do.

Advanced systems rate limit various aspects of the authentication protocols but you can get around that with spoofing.

By u$1ng!~ a password like that, you almost certainly guarantee that no one can crack it.

The next threat comes from key loggers and Trojans.

Climbing higher you find data centers and network infrastructure vulnerability.

And the easiest always being, hack the human, not the machine.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by opt˟ on February 5, 2014 at 5:02pm

Most people seem to get infected with virii by clicking "accept", in some form or another, on web pages or when installing common free software.

I always look for the [x] and if clicking [x] doesn't work, you know something is up. So I hit ctrl-alt-del and end the process in its tracks. You just need to know which process to kill - common sense really. Right click kill. Done.

[x] is important. Cancel buttons can be faked to actually be accept buttons.

When installing stuff, slow done and read the options. Click advanced. Don't just blow through it like an idiot noobie. Install exactly what you want, exactly where you want it, and nothing else. As you dig down the chain of 2nd rate software "additional installations", it becomes murkier and murkier. Some apps install 2 or 3 additional apps.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Robert Carobene on February 5, 2014 at 7:07pm

Yes this is so true!

• ▶ Reply