Passwords

Swathes of PSN users are having the passwords changed—which is, according to Sony, a “purely a precautionary measure” for “routine protection.” Which sounds slightly suspicious.

The Dumb Ways Some Websites Store Your Passwords

In an ideal world, passwords would be secured so tightly that not even the best hacker could get the merest sniff of your details. Sadly, that’s not always the case. Plenty of websites manage to mess up the way they store passwords. Naive encryption techniques, hashing or, worst of all, plain text? Put together by…

Swipe Passwords for Online Banking Is a Genius Idea

Online banking on your smartphone is one of those wonderful services that lets you avoid overdrafts, or more importantly, awkward, “your credit card has been declined” moments. But entering an online banking password on an itty bitty keyboard problem is no fun. Capital One’s new SureSwipe allows you to set up an Android-style pattern password…

If you’re still not sure if your details were thieved in that massive Adobe hack, you can use this tool to see if your email featured in the smash’n’grab.

Knock for iPhone Is the Most Fun You’ll Ever Have Unlocking Your Mac

Passwords are obnoxious, but until desktops start coming with a fingerprint/retina/any other type of body part scanner, they’re stuck dealing with the passcode security of yesteryear—or so it would seem. The new Knock app for iPhone, though, takes a more fun approach. If you’re an iPhone owner that uses a Mac in any capacity, you’ve…

Keep Your Precious Data Safe by Storing Passwords in Your Subconscious

Do you ever fear that, one day, data-hungry bandits will tie you to a chair and make you surrender your Facebook password? It’s not an unreasonable fear, actually. Christopher Nolan made a gripping documentary about this very scenario. But, thanks to a new method developed by scientists from Stanford and Northwestern, you may never have…

LastPass vs. KeePass: What’s the Best Online Password Management?

For years, we’ve been touting the virtues of KeePass Password Safe, a free open-source program for storing all your website passwords and associated notes behind a single master password. And to synch KeePass across multiple machines, we’ve been recommending that readers store the encrypted database on Dropbox. However, we got to wondering whether the popular…

These Rorschach Ink Tests Could Replace the Good Old CAPTCHA

The CAPTCHA is a wonderful thing, but it’s not without its failings. And as hackers get better and better at cracking them, a team of CMU engineers are proposing an alternative: Inkblot tests. It’s called a GOTCHA (of course), and it stands for Generating panOptic Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. The test…

How the Bible Is Helping Crack Your Passwords

The Bible might not be quite the good book it claims to be. According to an Ars Technica report on the future of password cracking, the holy book is being employed to help crack passwords to great effect. The article explains how security researchers Kevin Young and John Dustin have been using books acquired from…

Google Knows the Wi-Fi Passwords of All Android Users

A new privacy fuss is kicking off around Google’s Android mobile OS, with security boffins claiming that the software’s backup tools mean that a copy of everyone’s Wi-Fi password history is now saved to Google’s servers. Which may mean it could be legally compelled to hand them out, should a government come calling. The key…

This obsessive robot can crack your phone’s PIN in less than 24 hours

Admittedly, this isn’t the most elegant security threat we’ve ever seen, but it works. Meet R2B2, a 3D printed robot that punches PIN combination after PIN combination until it gets it right. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise when you figure that it takes about 10,000 combinations to crack any 4-digit password. The only…

After getting hacked earlier this year, Evernote is finally implementing new security features on accounts including two-step verification. Unfortunately, it’s only available to Evernote Premium and Evernote Business customers right now, but a full roll out is coming soon. https://gizmodo.com/evernote-was-hacked-and-your-encrypted-passwords-got-5988057

How to Enable Two-Factor Authentication on All Your Accounts

Twitter rolled out two-factor authentication last week, joining a growing group of tech companies to support the important security feature. Two-factor authentication can help mitigate the damage of a password breach or phishing attack. The principle comes from the idea that any authentication system—whether it’s the deadbolt on your front door, the lockscreen on your…

Would You Trust One Company to Oversee All of Your Passwords?

Last Friday at Interop, Paypal’s chief information security officer, Michael Barrett, let it be known that passwords were dead. “Passwords, when used ubiquitously everywhere at Internetscale are starting to fail us.” Given recent events surrounding Twitter account hacks and security breaches all over the web, Barrett isn’t completely wrong in his sentiment that passwords are…

The Ultimate (Free) Virus Protection Guide

So you got caught with your pants down on the Internet (figuratively, folks) and contracted a virus. That sucks. Or maybe you were wearing protection but still fell victim to some nasty bit of code that managed to slip by your antivirus software undetected. That sucks even more. Either way, it’s nothing to feel ashamed…

Report: Twitter Will Release Its Two-Step Verification Soon

Wired is reporting that Twitter has a two-step verification system currently undergoing internal testing that Twitter hopes to roll out to its users “shortly”. A two-step verification system would help prevent Twitter hacks from happening, like what happened today with the @AP. https://gizmodo.com/why-that-ap-tweet-about-the-white-house-explosions-is-d-5995276 There aren’t any details on how the two-step verification system would work…

Microsoft Will Finally Offer Two-Step Verification For Your Entire Account

Over the next few days Microsoft will begin rolling out an overhaul to accounts, which will include a crucial security upgrade: Two-step verification. This will go a long way to preventing hackers from getting into your account and causing all sorts of damage. So if you have a Microsoft Account, you should definitely set the…

Why AT&T Won’t Let You Swear in Your Passwords

It’s your inalienable right, as a citizen of the internet, to curse and swear as creatively as possible at all times. That’s 80-percent of why anyone fires up a browser to begin with. Which is why AT&T’s move to ban naughty language in passwords created no small amount of ire. So what gives? Before you…

How Apple’s Password-Reset Security Breach Worked

Yesterday, The Verge uncovered a security breach that allowed malicious users to reset Apple ID passwords with nothing but an email and the user’s birthday. Luckily, the process didn’t leak out in full before the whole thing was patched up, but now iMore was able to reproduce the hack step by step and now it’s…

Report: Apple Passwords Can Be Reset With Just Email and Birthday

Have you turned on your Apple ID two-step verification yet? You’ll want to get on that. A report from The Verge indicates that if you haven’t, hackers can change your password with nothing more than your email address and your birthday. https://gizmodo.com/apple-just-fixed-a-huge-security-hole-with-two-step-ver-5991755 Apparently, the exploit involves using a modified URL and then supplying the correct…