How Hacking Of Passwords Is Achieved?

Nowadays we use a lot of electronic tools such as email ,electronic bank account and many more electronic tools that we need password to use them, so we must make sure our password is safe or not?

These days several methods of password hacking is getting popular.
These methods can be categorized into 3 main sections which are as follows:

-the first and probably the most convenient method for hackers is social engineering which will get some personal information from you and will guess your password according to those info.
-the second way is decrypting your encrypted password key which was made by a hash program to achieve your password, this method needs lots of knowledge and a skilled and experienced hacker.
-the third and the last method is by using Brute Force technique which is done by a program , the procedure is very simple ,these programs will try several random keys with different combination to find your password but it would be a bit time-consuming.
My suggestion is to choose longer and less guessable password to make sure your accounts are safe.

http://www.hackingalert.com/hacking-articles/password-hackers.php

Iranian Cyber Army Hacked TWITTER for Several Hours

Several months ago a group in Iran which named themselves as “Iranian Cyber Army” shut down twitter for several hours and put an image on the twitter website which shows the flag of Iran and a message which represented that Iranian government has this power to hack very huge social networks such as twitter and USA has no power in comparison to Iran.

Doing this activity on a website like twitter caused lots of problems both for the home and business users which were using this platform to communicate with their friends, families and partners and it also make a fear in the user that their personal information and message is not on a secure place on the web.so what will be the result? The result will be a sharp decrease in the number of users who uses this website and it’ not the thing that the creator of such the website looking for. Although the security team of twitter solved the problem several hours later but the effect will last for several months.

The new threat which might encounter the users in the new future is about FACEBOOK , another huge virtual place for the users from different parts of the world.they can not be sure any more that their personal info will keep secure or not?

source:

http://fvdb.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/twitter-hacked-by-iran-cyber-army/

Data Theft via Portable Device

As the new portable devices such as Mobile phones, Flash memories and Mp3 players are getting more and more popular, a new security threat is showing up in the networks where the employees are bringing such the things to their workplace for their personal use.
Recently two computer scientists from University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow published an article in “International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics” which shows the illegal usage of these new portable devices in the workplace computing systems. These two researchers are introducing two methods in their article to decrease the numbers of data theft and malwares distribution via these devices into the computer networks.

The main problem with these devices is because of their large capacity and web connectivity capabilities which let even the normal users to carry huge amounts of data in a very small portable device and also can transfer them to internet or send them as email with Wi-Fi.Their suggestion to the organizations is that they should ban these portable devices to be brought to the workplace which contains valuable and confidential information by their employees. But as we know there is no possible way to remove the data leakage in the workplace completely.

Source:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100331081133.htm

CNET News on Identity Theft in Facebook

Social networks like Facebook are getting very popular nowadays and most of the people spend their times to communicate with their friends and family members via this virtual community. A new weblog named FBHive created a discussion board for the users to introduce the security gaps in Facebook. According to the recent news which this weblog alerted the users about that is a new security hole in Facebook which will let the hacker to view the basic information of the users such as Location, Gender, Relationship status and … .

In the first look it doesn’t seem too much critical but it will be a problem when you find out that this basic information can be the password hint for user’s accounts. The same problem was reported by this blog last year which was solved by the Facebook several months ago.
This weblog tries to introduce such the problem to Facebook security team to fill the gaps as soon as possible.

Source:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10270002-36.html