passwords

Don’t call the war on hackers unwinnable

Dave Farquhar security , , , , , , , ,

John C Dvorak asks what war we’re waging on hackers. While war may not be the best choice of words, because it’s not exactly a conventional war, there’s no question there’s something going on, and we’re not winning it right now.

The latest salvo is that someone in China is building a botnet using Macintoshes. Read more

Don’t give prospective employers your Facebook password

Dave Farquhar security ,

I’ve read multiple stories this week about potential employers demanding that interviewees hand over their Facebook passwords during the job interview so they can snoop around.

There’s no good reason for this.
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Don’t use Password1 as your password

Dave Farquhar security ,

CNN reported yesterday that Password1 is the most common password in business environments. It’s the simplest password that meets common “complexity” requirements. It illustrates the problem with complexity requirements–a password can meet those requirements while still being extremely predictable.

As such, those passwords can be easy to guess, and they cast doubt on the entire idea of complexity.

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Don’t reuse your Zappos.com password

Dave Farquhar security ,

Online shoestore Zappos.com got hacked. Among other things, the hackers got names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and encrypted passwords. That’s not as bad as getting unencrypted passwords, but there are some things you need to do immediately if you shop at Zappos.com.

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How to make a DMZ with two routers

Dave Farquhar security , , , , , , , ,

I’ve alluded in the past to why it’s a good idea to make a DMZ with two routers, but I’ve never gone into depth about how and necessarily why to do it.

If your ISP gave you a combination modem/switch/access point/router and it only supports 100 megabit wired and 54-megabit (802.11g) wireless and you want to upgrade to gigabit wired/150-meg (802.11n) wireless, here’s a great way to make the two devices work together and improve your security.

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How I secured my new wireless router

Dave Farquhar security , , , ,

For the first time ever, I actually have a wireless router that can cover my whole house. I’ve been interested in wireless security for a long time, but haven’t actually had to do much with it because I wasn’t running any wireless networks at home.

I spent a few minutes securing my network after I got it up and running. I talked at rather long length about that in the past, but on a really practical level, here’s what I did in a mere 10 minutes that will make a big difference.

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Pipe output to the clipboard in Windows

Dave Farquhar War Stories, Windows , , , , , , , , ,

Besides all the changes to the GUI that happened post-Windows XP, they also made one useful change to the command prompt. When you run a command, it’s now possible to pipe output to the clipboard.

If you’re like me and write a lot of documentation, or you just take a lot of notes while doing computer maintenance, it’s a big boon.

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My first really bad day in IT

Dave Farquhar security, War Stories , , , , , , ,

Next weekend is Labor Day weekend. I can’t remember if it was one Thursday or two Thursdays before Labor Day weekend in 1997, but one of those two days happened to be the beginning of the first crisis of my career.

Whichever Thursday it was, it was getting close to midnight when my phone rang. It was Max. The print server wasn’t working. That happened a lot. That server had IBM’s Services for Macintosh on it, which never worked all that well, and, worse, tended to make the rest of the server act up a lot. That in and of itself shouldn’t have been a crisis. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
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Is someone trying to hack Facebook? Maybe.

Dave Farquhar security

From the big bag o’ Google search queries: Is someone trying to hack Facebook?

Possibly. An announcement came out this week that Anonymous and Lulzsec, the groups behind some of the more notorious hacks this year, plan to try to take down Facebook on November 5. There’s some debate whether they can do it, even within the groups, it seems. Some even believe the announcement was a hoax. But these are the same groups that hacked virtually every cell phone at the hacker conventions in Las Vegas last week, so it has to be perceived as a threat.

What should you do?

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Why people hack Facebook accounts

Dave Farquhar security , ,

I’ve seen several people I know ask me recently why people hack Facebook accounts. Their Facebook accounts got hacked recently, and they couldn’t figure out why.

I know why. It probably wasn’t Sanford Wallace doing it, but it probably was someone just like him.

So who is Sanford Wallace and why does he want in your Facebook account?
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