Do you still reuse passwords? The recent study from University of California shows again that such a bad habit continues to exist. The worst thing about reusing passwords is that it doesn’t require being a technically skilled hacker to guess your password for this or that document.  

Considering Intel Core i7? Read Nvidia Says Core i7 Isn’t Worth It and nVidia calls Core i7 a waste of money first. We’d agree that investing into GPU(s) is really a good idea, especially if you need to crack passwords.

Water cooling, liquid nitrogen, and dry ice  – which gets the most of your  ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics card? Learn it  from Zac O’Vadka today’s post. 

Strong passwords are mutated passwords. Everyone who publishes recommendations on creating secure password says that you have to use both upper- and lower-case letters and inject some tricky special characters. Such recommendations may result in p@$$words and pAsswOrds, and p_a_s_s_w_o_r_d_s. The fact is that modern password recovery software uses dictionary attack to get one’s password back. Dictionary attack means searching lists of dictionary words and common phrases that can be found on the Internet or delivered with the software. It is easy to grab that dictionary words and word phrases make bad passwords, but one has to understand that adding special characters to these words and phrases does’t do them any good. Such password can be easily cracked when smart mutations option is on. 

Michael Kassner placed an article about Surveillance Self-Defense in the TechRepublic, where he gives brief outline of the SSD website. Though some can endlessly brood over the grounds for the project foundation, for me one is clear that this site can be very much helpful to put all principal computer security guidelines together and close the gaps in your own security.
(more…)

In case if you missed it: new ATI Catalyst drivers (9.4) now available (you can read the release notes for details). For some reason, some driver files have been renamed (well, not in 9.4, but in 9.3 released a bit earlier, though that version was really buggy and we cannot recommend to use it anyway), and our WPA password recovery (audit) software was not able to recognize Radeon cards anymore.

Fresh life experience…A very good friend of mine told me a story I would like to share with you with her kind permission. Recently she has found a new job in a medium size company. She was perfectly satisfied with her new position and new tasks. She also got a well equipped working place including her principal tool for work – computer, which actually she inherited from an ex-employee who lately moved to another company. The company could have bought her a new computer, but what for, if there was working one absolutely ownerless. Windows XP already installed along with numerous useful applications, even her favorite Safari was there.

The Encrypting File System (EFS) was first introduced in Windows 2000 and, as Microsoft claims, is an excellent encryption system with no back door.

lifehacker has started a series of posts on choosing and using secure passwords. Few days ago they published a list of handy tips from their readers on how to create passwords you can rely on. One of the readers admitted that in a company he works for IT administrators require password change every 30 days and

Have you ever had to say sorry because you’ve sent an e-mail to a wrong person? Isn’t it an embarrassing situation? Hopefully it wasn’t a confidential e-mail otherwise you may get into trouble. After all it’s typical of all of us. You’ve simply made a stupid blunder to enter a wrong address…or to use AutoComplete. Such things may trigger some unpleasant consequences which is actually a minimal harm AutoComplete can incur.