News items and other various tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share with his friends.
The linked article lists the top 10 most common passwords. I remember that, some time ago, there was a virus that used a dictionary attack, with only a few hundred common passwords. Despite the limited number, it was surprisingly successful.
Ransomware is malicious software that encrypts your computer files, say via a virus, and then demands you pay money to get them unencrypted. There’s a new strain of a virus that’s doing this, and it’s in the wild. Fortunately the encryption key is only 1024 bits, which means it’s susceptible to a brute-force algorithm (see a related Chad’s News article).
Link: http://blog.washingtonpost.com/…
(via digg)
We spend so much time and energy dealing with hackers attempting to take over our computers that it’s easy to forget about the physical theft of server hardware. As the linked article asks, “How secure is your data center?”
You’ve seen CAPTCHAs, even if you’re not familiar with the word. They’re those pictures with distorted words that you have to enter when registering or posting on some sites. It’s supposed to ensure that it’s a real, live human performing the input, instead of some sort of ‘bot. Well, the ‘bots are getting good at reading CAPTCHAs—so good that they can average one valid guess per minute on Windows Live Hotmail. This makes CAPTCHAs fairly useless, and I expect to see them get phased out for something better (whatever that may be). Chad’s News uses an arithmetic entry for anonymous comment submission, but even this has not stopped some spammers.
Link: http://arstechnica.com/…
Adobe has posted a fairly important update to its Flash player. You can download it from this link. (I’m not totally sure about this, but it appears that Firefox users on Microsoft Windows may need to install it twice: once under Firefox and once under Internet Explorer.)
This Lifehacker poll provides a nice list of free Windows firewalls and their relative popularity. I used ZoneAlarm for a while but gave up on it because it didn’t allow me to unblock specific incoming ports. (Or at least, I couldn’t figure out how to unblock them.)
Link: http://lifehacker.com/…
Allowing firewire controllers to have direct memory access (DMA) may have seemed like a good idea at the time (e.g., faster transfer speeds), but who would’ve thought that it could be used to circumvent Windows password protection? Once again, this goes to show that lack of physical security means no security.
Link: http://www.theage.com.au/…
(via Engadget)
This is one of the more bizarre examples of computer viruses that I’ve heard. The virus, actually a Trojan Horse, comes in digital photo frames that were manufactured in China. When the photo frame is connected to a computer, the Trojan Horse is downloaded from the frame to the computer. Nasty.
Link: http://www.sfgate.com/…
(via Engadget)
This tip from Kim Komando tells how to easily log in to a password-protected Windows computer. Just goes to show the importance of physical security.
Link: http://komando.com/…
Why go to all that work stealing passwords and financial/personal information when you can have someone else do it for you?
Link: http://it.slashdot.org/…
Let’s see… a long flight, a bored computer hacker. Yup, it’s going to happen.
Link: http://www.wired.com/…
(via Engadget)
About 1800 Maxtor hard drives were found to have two trojan horses pre-installed. The manufacturer managed to recall most of the drives, but some are in the hands of customers.
Link: http://www.computerworld.com/…
(via Kim Komando)
Chad Cloman
Denver, CO USA
