Freenigma offers a free firefox extension that adds cryptography functionality to Yahoo, Gmail and MSN. The team says it is working on adding other emails services, as of now, only the three services mentioned are supported. You have to signup at their website to recieve an invitation before you will be able to download the extension. They state that it could take a few hours the most before you recieve the invitation. Mine arrived about ten minutes after I completed it.
Device Lock allows you to close open USB and firewire ports as well as other device ports that make it possible to run external devices on your computer. With all the live cds and programs that run from USB such connections to the pc have become a greater security risk than ever before. System administrators as well as security concerned end users should disable every means of accessing the pc or running software from devices that could access it.
Relakks had a few problems shortly after their start due to the amount of users that registered the service right after it was introduced. Connections have been really slow and I had no chance to further test the service and write about my experience with it. I'am currently writing this article while being connected to Relakks and everything is working fine so far. I'am able to open websites and surf the internet without problems. I'am able to check my email and download files using Relakks.
I signed up with Relakks yesterday and was satisfied with this clean and easy process. I had to provide only some information like name, email, password and username and was able to log on to their system. My status was inactive at that time because I did not make a purchase yet. I decided to try the service for one month and had to provide my credit card details in order to do so. One month would cost 6$ which is a good price if they live up to their promises which are a) anonymous internet experience and b) maximum speed.
The Pirate Party is a swedish party that has three main goals: Protected Privacy, Free Knowledge and Shared Culture. They are making a bid for the Swedish parliament in the upcoming election and just introduced the worlds first commercial darknet called Relakks. Let us take a look at the definition of Relaks from the website:
Password chart is an online service that helps you improve the quality of your passwords. The principle is pretty easy: You enter a phrase at the beginning which will be used to create the password chart. An example would be "Make your passwords stronger with passwordchart.com" or "https://www.ghacks.net/ is gr3at". The password chart will be displayed on the right side of the screen changing while you are adding new chars to the phrase. You can opt to add numbers and punctuation for increased security, they will be added to the chart on the right.
A web proxy is becoming more and more important in todays internet. Schools and Companys tend to block sites pretty quickly nowadays, especially when the blocking is directed at just a few websites and not every website in that category. Web Proxys might be able to sneak past this policies and display the site in your browser even though it is banned in the network.
I have written a small php script that lookups your IP, your browser, the refering site and the remote port. The website has no ads at all and loads pretty fast. This might be useful for those who are using proxys and want to check if those proxys are spilling their IP address or not. The RIAA for example is identifying downloaders by their IP address.
IceSword is a new contender for the title of the best rootkit revealing and removing program out there at the moment. It is rather hard to find a working download of IceSword but as always I provide a fast way to download the latest version of Icesword named IceSword1.18.rar. Click the link to download the rootkit scanner from rapidshare. In contrast to other rootkit scanners like Blacklight Icesword can not be run automatically. Icesword only provides perhaps the most powerful utilities to scan your system for rootkits and other information.
AntiVir is probably the best free antivirus software. It´s free for non commercial use and updates its virus definitions regulary just like in the professional version. The free version however has the habit to display a advertisment popup after each update, which normally means that you see this ad every single day. It is always the same ad and I don´t see a reason for this at all, once is fine but everyday ?
Phishing is a popular method to capture personal data such as passwords, transaction numbers and credit card details. The company I´am working with locks several user accounts each day to prevent harm done to them due to phishing. It normaly starts with an email asking you to update your profile, to download a security update or a email that reveals that you are the highest bidder of an ebay auction (that you do not know about).
What a great little freeware application. Seconfig is only 37K in size and can be right from the location that you decided to unpack it to. The freeware has three main functions: Restrict Lan-like access, Service settings and TCP/IP settings. You may disable netbios, SMB and RPC over TCP/IP in the first, those are major entry points for worms and hackers.
Great list of the top 100 network security tools voted by 3243 users of the nmap-hackers mailing list. Every tool mentioned has a description, a homepage link to the developers, icons that tell you if it works on your system and if it costs money. All utilities belong to a category, you have the option to display every category. (like vulnerability scanners)
There have been lots of articles lately that explain how to secure a wireless network. Most of this articles contain at least one measure that is not enhancing security at all. This does not neccessarily mean that it is lowering the security on the other hand though. Let us take a look at the six dumbest ways to secure a Wirelss Lan.
SQL injection is a security vulnerability that occurs in the database layer of an application. Its source is the incorrect escaping of dynamically-generated string literals embedded in SQL statements. It is in fact an instance of a more general class of vulnerabilities that can occur whenever one programming or scripting language is embedded inside another.
You might remember that I wrote an article in late november called Beginners Guide to securing your pc. You might even remember that I suggested that there was no need for a desktop firewall at all. And you might even remember that I got some pretty bad comments about my suggestion in the comments section.
If you´re ever in the need of a high security password the Ultra High Security Password Generator Website might be exactly what you´ve been looking for. Everytime you visit or refresh the website it will display three randomly generated passwords, one 64 random hexadecimal charakters password, one 63 random printable ASCII chars and finally a 63 random alpha-numeric characters password.
LogMeIn is another service that gives you remote control over a computer. It uses a java applet that has to be executed be the computer that should be controlled and a website that gives you control over the computer (or more than one) with the applet. That means you don´t have to install software or use a usb stick to run programs on the other computer, you simply open a website and control the computer at home.
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Ghacks is a technology news blog that was founded in 2005 by Martin Brinkmann. It has since then become one of the most popular tech news sites on the Internet with five authors and regular contributions from freelance writers.