Good Password, Good Password!

Security breaches happen commonly. When it's a brute-force attack, we can easily prevent a hack by making very strong passwords.

At xkcd, Randall wrote a very amusing comic. It is: https://xkcd.com/936/

To choose a good password, you can choose uncommon words and simple change the letter "o" to 0, "s" to $, and more. For example, two uncommon words are "trombone" and "tranquil". (They're a bit common, but at least it's better than more common words.) TranquilTrombone would not make a good password, but a good username. Let's begin our transformations with a small rule list:

- "o" or "O" turns into 0

- "i", "I", "L", or "l" turn into 1

- "s" or "S" turn into $

Transformation Level 1: Tranqu11Tr0mb0ne, according to howsecureismypassword.net, takes 377 billion years to crack.

At 4 billion calculations per second.

Yahoo! Security, Please.

Sorry for having such a long break between posts. Things never work out.... or do they?

For the hackers, they do. Yahoo! Mail had some accounts be reportedly hacked, forcing the Sunnyvale company to prompt a password reset.

A full report?

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/01/31/yahoo-prompts-password-reset-after-mass-attack-on-email-service/

The Naked Security blog is owned and operated by Sophos, a computer security company based in the United Kingdom. Sophos is not affiliated in any way with me.

This also warns us: KEEP YOUR PASSWORDS SAFE! I'll be writing another post soon about choosing hard-to-guess and easy-to-memorize passwords.

Yahoo! Ad Hack: Weekly Dose

Some of Yahoo's ads are now malicious iframes served from ads.yahoo.com without warning.

It redirects to an exploit kit.

So this quick first actual post will remind you to not click on ads.

Weekly Security Introduction

Weekly Security, the blog, brings the best of security to you every Monday, keeping you safe on the Internet so you can go on with your daily business.

Weekly Security was a thing I thought about one night, because of the recent Yahoo ad hack (our 1/6/2014 topic.)

The writer(s) of this blog want to have you get the best out of gigabyte-taking software, your web browser, and not let any malicious software invade. It's better to not get it rather then get it and treat it.