I recently had a chance to talk with an FBI agent who works with computer evidence. Here are some of the things I took away from the conversation. A lot of his job is fairly easy because most criminals have no idea how a computer works. I asked if he ran into any type of encryption very often and he said it was very rare. There was only one case where someone was using encryption and he said it was completely luck that they were able to catch him because he hadn't chosen a very good password. Now I'm not telling you this so you can go out and start a life of crime. But the things that make Mr. FBI Agent's life easier also make the life of identity thieves a lot easier. So what do … [Read more...] about A Talk With The FBI
passwords
Passwords – Different For Each Account
The founder of Facebook has been accused of using information from Facebook to break into email accounts at Harvard Crimson (Harvard's newspaper). While I don't know if it is true or not, the technique is plausible and is an excellent demonstration of why you shouldn't use the same password for every website and how important it is to create secure passwords. The story says that the Facebook founder was concerned about a story the Crimson planned on running. He located people on Facebook who said they worked at the Crimson. Since it sounds like Facebook stores passwords in a secure manner, he couldn't simply look them up from the database. Instead, he went through the server's logs to try … [Read more...] about Passwords – Different For Each Account
Using Different Passwords
Recently some hackers got a hold of a list of usernames and passwords for a dating site. By itself, this wouldn't have been too big of deal. However, many of the victims were using the same password on other sites. This gave the hackers access to many Facebook, MySpace, AIM and GMail accounts. The hackers then did everything they could to embarrass the victims by posting things online. This ranged from making a minister look like he was having an affair to creating a panic that someone was going to commit suicide. I've previously talked about how it is a good idea to use different passwords, if not for every site, at least for every type of site. (You don't want to use the … [Read more...] about Using Different Passwords
10 Tips for Creating Secure Passwords
If you do anything with computers, you deal with passwords and you probably have a handful of different passwords for different sites and systems. The best password is something that you will never forget, but even your family or closest friend would never guess. In my experience people either have extremely secure passwords like J!*xurQ1# that are so difficult to remember that they have to write them down (which defeats the security of a password) or extremely unsecure to start with, like Jonny (the name of their spouse). The goal of this post is to give you some ideas on how to generate secure passwords. The tips start out with some simple ways to come up with terms and end with … [Read more...] about 10 Tips for Creating Secure Passwords
Password Resolutions for 2009
Our passwords give us access to a number of very valuable resources. They control access to our bank accounts, photos of our families, email correspondence, and all kinds of other information. As valuable as all this information is, it is amazing how little effort most people put into making sure they have good passwords. Here are six password resolutions for 2009 to help protect your data with more secure passwords. 1. Resolve to use different passwords on each website. There are a few ways to do this. The most secure is to use a completely different randomly generated password on each site. If you use a password management program like 1Passwd this isn't too difficult. Another … [Read more...] about Password Resolutions for 2009
Password Creation Technique
I ran across a nice post on creating unique passwords today. Also see our previous post on the subject. … [Read more...] about Password Creation Technique