It’s World Password Day!
Are your passwords strong enough?
Do you have a long, unique password for every account?
Do you use multi-factor authentication where available?
If you answered, “no” to any of these questions…
All tagged passwords
5 Tips For Online Holiday Shopping
2020 has obviously been a strange and challenging year for everyone and this holiday season, shopping will be mostly online. Follow these 5 tips to better secure your holiday shopping experience.
Trump's Twitter Account Hacked...Again?
At a campaign rally in Tuscon, AZ on Monday, Donald Trump stated, “Nobody gets hacked. To get hacked, you need somebody with 197 IQ and he needs about 15 percent of your password.” The video quickly spread across the cybersecurity social media circles and generated a lot of attention. Today, Between The Hacks will dissect Trump’s statements, touch on some related news about a possible hack of Trump’s Twitter account, and share a few basic tips on how to secure your social media accounts.
Have I Been Pwned?
In late 2013, after the Adobe data breach, Australian cybersecurity expert, Troy Hunt, created the free web service, HaveIBeenPwned (HIBP), “as a free resource for anyone to quickly assess if they may have been put at risk due to an online account of theirs having been compromised or ‘pwned’ in a data breach.”
What does “pwned” mean? In this context, it basically means that…
New Report: Employees’ Poor Password Practices Put Businesses Around the World at Risk
LastPass has released its third annual Global Password Security Report where they analyzed over 47,000 businesses to share interesting and helpful insights into employee password behavior at businesses around the world. The report is free but you will have to give up some contact information to download it.
The key takeaways are:
Businesses still have a lot of work to do in the area of password and authentication security.
Businesses are increasing their use of multi-factor authentication (MFA) but employees still have poor password hygiene.
Rainbow Tables: The Password Conundrum Part 4
In the forth and final post in this series on passwords, I’ll talk to you about rainbow tables. I think the best way to get people to create and use good passwords is to teach them how passwords are cracked.
Long ago, when UNIX-like systems were used as shared servers and most people logged into them with “dumb terminals”, users could see who else had accounts on the system. This was convenient, especially in work or academic environments and acted as a directory of sorts. So if Alice wanted to send an email message to Bob, she would just log on to the system and look at a file called /etc/passwd. This file showed each person’s username, name, and other information. This file also contained each users password in the form of something called a hash. Trend Micro explains that, “Hash values can be thought of as fingerprints for files”. The hash is a mathematical representation of the password that cannot be reversed or
Multi-Factor Authentication: The Password Conundrum Part 3
In part 1 of the Password Conundrum, we talked about how we all hate passwords and how we can never remember a strong, unique password for every website, system, and application that we use.
In part 2, we talked about how a password manager can solve this problem and make your digital life much easier and more secure.
In part 3, I’ll explain multi-factor authentication and how to use it.
You don’t need an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) degree to use MFA (multi-factor authentication). Sorry for the acronym humor. MFA requires a user to provide an additional means of authentication or verification, in addition to entering a username and password.
Before we delve into MFA, let’s talk quickly about authentication.
How Attackers Access Your Accounts Using Credential Stuffing
Almost every day we see headlines about some sort of data breach. The public is now almost numb to this news and the reaction by the end users whose credentials were lost, is typically to reset their password and move on.
This is likely not good enough for most people, because, according to a January 2019 study by Yubico and Ponemon, 51 percent of the respondents reuse their passwords across multiple accounts.
So why is it bad to reuse passwords across multiple accounts? Because bad guys will take that long list of usernames and passwords from data breaches, and use them in an attack called credential stuffing. I know, this sounds like a bad Thanksgiving side dish full of conference badges. Trust me, it’s worse!
Password Managers (The Password Conundrum: Part 2)
In part 1 of the Password Conundrum, we talked about how we all hate passwords and how the crazy cybersecurity wonks tell us that we have to do unreasonable things like:
Make passwords that are so complex that you can’t possible remember (long and multiple character sets)
Make a unique password for every one of the 10’s or hundreds of sites and applications that we use, oh, and they all have to be long and strong which means we won’t remember them.
Today we are going to explain how you can achieve this and actually make your life more secure and much easier than back when you had to remember all of those passwords or look them up on a spreadsheet on your computer’s desktop. Enter, the Password Manager!
Protecting Yourself Online
Securing endpoints has always been a challenge as they have been a favorite target of attackers. The problem of vulnerable computers goes far beyond securing your computer and home network. Any Internet connected computer that has been compromised, could be used as part of a botnet to attack and take down other Internet systems or even slow down large parts of the Internet. Cybersecurity is bigger than all of us and is the responsibility of everyone for the good and welfare of the Internet at large.