This actually is in the “good news” department. The some security folks at Facebook are scouring the Dark Web, looking for rainbow tables of user names and passwords in order to find Facebook users who may be reusing the same password on multiple sites. As we have discussed here many times, password reuse creates a serious security vulnerability. If the cyber-crooks have your password for one site, they will try it on other ...
One of the hardest types of phishing emails to defend against are those that come from the email account of a friend or trusted business associate, such as your dentist, lawyer, realtor. The sender’s email address is not spoofed, because the malefactor has tricked them into providing their email address password. The bad guys are actually logged into your friend’s email account, and now they are trying to do the same thing to ...
On Monday we attacked the utility of current password policies and standards. Today we will offer up an array of improvements.
To be truly effective from a security perspective, password policies need to be designed to withstand both online and offline password cracking methods. We discussed offline methods in our post last month, so we will not do more than recap them ...
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Most corporate password policies are a waste off time and do not add anything extra to providing secure authentication. Many of these policies were put in place to meet the standards of various compliance bodies (PCI-DSS, HIPAA, etc.) But basically these policies are not keeping up with the state of the art in password cracking, as we discussed last November in our post on ...
The site Adult Friend Finder, the “world’s largest sex and swingers site” recently exposed 412 million user credentials due to poor, or in some cases, non-existent password hashing practices. The biggest group losses were:
As we discussed last week, the reason that the Yahoo breach went unreported ...
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The answer to this question is complicated, but not impossible to understand. The first thing to know is that most passwords are not cracked by guessing, or trying thousands of possibilities one at a time on a typical login screen. Most systems will lock the account after a certain small number of failed attempts, like 5 or 6. This makes the kind of ...
As we approach year-end, many small and medium sized business owners and managers are coming to the realization that their best intentions for creating a cybersecurity program in their organization have fallen short. This was the year, you promised yourself, that we get a handle on computer and network security.
Well it is not too late to get a start, and here is a ...
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On Monday we looked at the some of the primary attack vectors used by cyber-criminals. Here are the rest of the attack vectors that Kevin Thompson from FireEye shared at the Cyber Security Summit. Many of these are significant twists on old exploits, or more sophisticated exploits.
The National Institute for Standards and Technology is working on new password guidelines which will be mandated for government sector users, and strongly recommended for businesses as well. Still in draft from, the standards can be found on the document Special Publication 800-63-3: Digital Authentication Guidelines. Here are some of the recommended changes, so far. We approve, and in many cases have ...
When you lose your login credentials to an online account, it can be devastating. Depending on what was compromised and what was lost, you may have an expensive and time-consuming task on your hands. So the bad guys took your user ID and password, or some other personal information. Was it worth it? There is an active resale market for this information, and ...