Posted on 18 October 2010
Jason Hart, An ethical Hacker traveled the main routes of six UK cities using freely-available “wardriving” software. The aim of the operating was to determine the number of networks that were either open or easily accessible.
The results showed nearly 40,000 networks as high risk, allowing access to the personal data of thousands of individuals to hackers and identity thieves.
Also as part of the survey the team were able to sniff passwords to email and other accounts at a rate of 350 per hour from public wireless access points such as those in pub’s, airports and cafes.
Numerous reports in the media have been published about the same problem here in Ireland however people don’t see too bothered.
After the victim became aware that his email account had been hacked he filed a complaint with the police. Shortly thereafter Qatar’s Cyber Crime police managed to track and arrest the perpetrator.
“We assure you that we can crack a cybercrime immediately after it is committed, so people would do better to abstain,” said a Qatar official. He added that the law provided for three years’ prison term for the offenders in such cases.
“We are citing the example of the secondary school student to tell one and all that no one who commits a cybercrime in the country can go unpunished,” he said.
Posted on 14 April 2010
People generally use the same password for lots of different websites which is not a very good idea.
Stanford PWDHash
PwdHash is a browser addon that transparently converts a user’s password into a domain-specific password.
What does this mean?
Say for example you login to Gmail using the password “password123″ and you also use this same password on your Facebook account. By using PWDHash the password123 is hashed with the domain, gmail.com to give the password “oDWsVkXNO1GpD”. When hashed with facebook.com it gives a completely different password, “2oHZykUiHmA3H”.
You might be wondering at this point, right how am I going to remember a password like “2oHZykUiHmA3H”. With PWDHash installed, you don’t need to remember either of the two long passwords. By hitting F2 (place the cursor in the password field and press the F2 key) and then typing “password123″ PWDHash automatically replaces what you have typed to “oDWsVkXNO1GpD” if you are using gmail.com and “oDWsVkXNO1GpD” if you are using facebook.com.
To start using PWDHash follow these simple steps:
Go here and install the add-on for Firefox or here to install the add-on for Google Chrome.
Once you have the add-on installed you can then go to the settings page of your Gmail, Facebook, Hotmail or whatever and request a password change.
When you are typing your new password make sure you press F2 before typing it, or alternatively precede it with “@@”.
Once you have entered your new password (usually twice for verification purposes) you should now be able to start using PWDHash, Just make sure to hit F2 before you type your password when logging in.
If you are using a different browser or you’re at a computer where PWDHash is not installed simply go to http://www.pwdhash.com and enter the details there. Then just copy and paste your password from the PWDHash website to the password field of where you’re trying to login.
