Password Hacking and You

There are 2 primary methods to hack passwords: Brute Force and Password Guessing. Of the 2, believe it or not, it is easier to guess someone’s password than to try every combination of letters, numbers and symbols. In a brute force attack, password attempts would progress from: a, b, c; to aa, ab, ac; to aaa, aab, aac; and so on.   The core question is not, “Can my password be hacked?”, but rather “How long would it take?”. That’s where password entropy comes into play for our (the user’s) benefit. Loosely defined, entropy is disorder. Since a brute force attack is a very orderly attack, the more disorder you have in your password = better.   Numbers GameWith 5 lower case characters, an online attack...

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180M Smartphones Vulnerable To Hacker Eavesdropping

Appthority, the enterprise mobile threat protection company, announced news on Thursday (Nov. 9) that it published research on its recent discovery of a so-called Eavesdropper vulnerability, in which hackers can intercept texts, voice messages and other user data from millions of smartphones through their mobile apps. In a press release, the company said the cyberattack vulnerability is caused by “developers carelessly hard coding their credentials in mobile applications that use the Twilio Rest API or SDK, despite best practices the company clearly outlines in its documentation.” Twilio, said Appthority, has reached out to all developers with affected apps and is actively working to secure their accounts. According to the company,...

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