The online shopping portal Amazon may accept password variants during login according to the German technology news site Heise Online. According to the information published there, Amazon may accept passwords that are not the exact password of the user account. The login script may ignore upper and lower case as well as characters after the [...]

Categories: Amazon, Security

If you are working with the default password manager in the Firefox browser you may have noticed that it does not offer options to edit the login information directly. All it can do is to display the site, username and password in a password listing. The option is available under Tools > Options > Security [...]

Categories: Browsing, Firefox

You may have already read it on other sites that Lifehacker and other Gawker Media properties were compromised. That’s bad enough for the company and web properties they own, but also for users of the sites. You see, users needed to create an account at Lifehacker and other sites before they were able to comment. [...]

Categories: Security

New technologies and more powerful computer systems have made it important in the last years to create secure passwords to avoid successful automatic password cracking attempts via brute force and dictionary attacks. But how do passwords have to look like to be considered secure? And who determines that? There is no authority with guidelines on [...]

Categories: Security

How many passwords do you have to remember? Or how many client passwords do you have to keep hidden away from prying eyes? If you have too many passwords to remember, I always find it best to store those passwords in some form of encrypted tool. Because of the amount of passwords I have to [...]

Categories: Linux, Open Source, Security

As more and more of us live more of our lives online with banking, shopping, photo galleries and social networking etc. a part of our daily lives, it becomes more and more important to have secure passwords.  But there are problems in remembering complex passwords when there are so many websites you have accounts with.  My [...]

Categories: Advice

RockYou, a service that offers applications like slideshows, games, layouts and more for social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace or Orkut that of the network’s users seem to love so much was recently hacked and the service’s entire database of 30+ million data sets exposed. This alone would have been problematic but the situation grew [...]

Categories: Security

The latest video card generation that is manufactured by ATI and Nvidia can be used to speed up password recovery attempts tremendously. Toolkits like Nvidia’s CUDA offer drivers and development examples to aid developer’s in the integration of gpu accelerated password recovery programs. One of the programs that is making use of the gpu to [...]

Categories: Software, Windows

So called fine-grained password policies are a new feature of Windows Server 2008. This new feature allows system administrators to configure password policies for different user groups. Windows Server 2003 was not as flexible as it only allowed to set one password policy for all users. The manual configuration of fine-grained password policies requires quite [...]

Categories: Software, Windows