21/02/2018
Today i would like to cover passwords. It will be one of the first things you are asked to do when you set up your own computer. The first question you will probably ask is, why do we need passwords? The most common answer to that is security. However, if you don’t really know what you are keeping secure, you won’t really know why you are using one in the first place.
Passwords and computer security is a huge area that have produced vast volumes on the subject. Basically, you are protecting yourself from thieves. The biggest growth in crime these days is identity theft. If someone can get enough details from you then they can steal your identity. Not only that, they can steal your page, your email address. They can lock you out of your own computer and demand a ransom to release it. I have seen all of these scams, and a lot more besides.
There are programs out there that can borrow your CPU, and use it to do computations. This is called distributed computing, and it can be done legally. I really don’t want to go into depth here. There are companies and big organizations out there; ones like NASA, who do extremely complicated computations, often testing things called algorithms, so on and so forth. They have a scheme where by you can donate some of the computational power of your computer to them. Drug companies looking for cures for cancer, companies running weather models, etc. This is legal, and you have to sign up for it to take part. These companies then use some of the computational power of your computer to help them solve very complicated problems.
Let’s say you have a single computer working on a complicated computation. It could take a thousand years to complete. If you have a thousand computers working on various parts of the problem, then it may take only a year. That is a lot of processing power, used to benefit mankind.
However, if you are part of a criminal organization, and you are trying to crack the codes to break into The Bank of England, then you are going to need a lot of processing power. A criminal gang may well have a number of hackers working on this problem, but the kind of security the banks have, can take the criminal’s years to crack – if at all. If these gangs can get their hands on the processing power of over a thousand computers, then it may well take them no more than a few days to bust in and steal everyone’s money, that and transfer huge amounts to off shore bank accounts.
What you have to understand is that computers are not just toys. They aren’t just for playing games on or sending pictures of your grandchildren to other members of your family. They are very powerful tools that can in the wrong hands can do extreme amounts of malicious damage. The simple fact is there are plenty people out there with computers, that we would all consider the wrong hands. Some of them are kids who think it’s fun to break into their friends Facebook account and block them out of it, or post dirty messages or pictures posing as their friends. This little game is called Frape. This is the thin end of the stick. I once had my email account hacked, and the hacker sent thousands of emails containing advertising for different po*******hy websites using my email address. Luckily my ISP provider spotted the sudden increase in traffic for my email address and closed it down. It meant I had to call them up, because I could no longer access my email account. They then told me what had happened and that they had reset my password. I made damn sure I made a much stronger password after that. For the next few days after the hack I received lots of email from lots of different people telling me what they thought about me. It most certainly isn’t nice being called a pervert by a sixty year old lady you have never met from halfway around the world, yet this happens thousands of times every day. There is always a new scam or a new scheme dreamed up by these people to get a hold of your passwords or to crack them online.
So how do we do it? How do you set up a password that people won’t guess very quickly or at all? Well the first thing you don’t do is set your password as password or PASSWORD. Look at this.
The top 20 most common passwords reported by companies in 2015.
1. 123456 2. Password 3. 12345 4. 1234
5. football 6. qwerty 7. 1234567890 8. 1234567
9. princess 10. solo 11. login 12. welcome
13. loveme 14. hottie 15. abc123 16. 121212
17. 123654789 18. flower 19. passw0rd 20. dragon
So that is your top twenty of, please for gods sake don’t use these paswords. You may be puzzaling at number 6. Qwerty, as many of you will be unfamiliar with the word. It is in fact the name for the layout of most modern keyboards, like the one I am typing on now. The hack time for all of the above is little more than a few seconds to a few minutes.
How do we avoid getting caught out? The first thing to do is get yourself a hold of a small notebook. Then we don’t use the names of our children or grandchildren, nor do we use the names of our pets. In fact avoid any name or word that you may find in the dictionary. In fact the best way is to make something up; like this. THv6800@cbNCw # #. You will notice I have used capital letters(uppercase), normal letters(lowercase) along with numbers and symbols. This fifteen letter password would take a hacker decades to crack, simply because of the complexity of the password, and its randomness. So write down the name of the site you wish to make a password for, and then make one up writing it into the notebook first. Once you have done that then you can type the password exactly as you have written it down into whatever you need the pasword for. If you are online, you may well be asked if you wish to save the password. You can select yes or no. the choice is yours. If you select yes then every time you visit that site then the browser should automaticaly add your username and password to the site and all you will have to do is hit enter to logon.
So if the browser is going to save the password for you then why bother writing it down in the first place? That’s fairly simple. You may one day use a different browser that does not have the password saved on it. You may well get a new computer some time in the future where there will be no passwords saved. Some websites occasionaly get you to renenter your pasword at random times to make sure you are still you. It is a security measure they use to safeguard their users. Be sure of one thing; if you don’t write it down, you are defonately going to need it again some day. If you forget it or lose it, then it is a hasstle to get a new one.
Let me tell you a little story about paswords. A few years ago while at collage I caught some of the young lads talking about hacking a friends facebook acount to p**s him off. I didn’t think they could do it. However one of them showed me how it was done. He knew his friends email address and simply tried to log into facebook with it. Of course he couldn’t because he didn’t know the password. What he did next was click on the forgot password option. Facebook asked him if he wanted to reset it or see the password hint that he had set up. The young lad selected the later and facebook gave him a hint to the password. That password hint was his pets name. The young lad went back onto his friends facebook, looked through his photos until he found a picture of the pet and of course the pets name was there as well. The young lad then went back to the logon page and put in his friends pets name into the password box, and lo and behold he was in. He then proceded to write something extremly rude, and also changed his friends password so he could not access his own account. It took aproxamately five minutes.
Now there are different types of accounts that you need passwords for. You may enjoy browsing different types of website, like gardening sites, or maybe home décor sites. Now a lot of these sites wont let you peruse their main catalouges until you have signed up for the site. This is just so they can get a hold of your email address so they can send you special offers and things like that. Basicaly they are going to send you junk mail. Now there is no problem with doing this. If you want to do so, then go ahead and sign up for it. Yes you will get masses of junk mail, but if you enjoy looking at their site then you probabily wont mind it anyway. They will most likely ask you for your name and an email address. They will also ask you to provode a password. Providing that is all the information you are giving, then there is no problem with you making up a simple password and using for sites like these. Be warned though. If you are on a website and you are signing up to view their catalouge; if you are asked for your bank details or a credit card details up front for verification purposes, then get the hell out of there. There are many websites out there that look like the genuine thing, however a genuine site will not ask you for any bank or credit card details until you actualy purchase something and are checking out. I will cover how to recognse a genuine website a little later. If you are going to be using a site to purchase goods, then hit it with a very strong password. Neither should you use a password more than once. If you use the same password for everything then once a hacker has your password for one thing, then they also have it for absolutly every other thing you do online.
So there you have it. Take my advice or don’t, it is entirely up to you.
