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.