Spoke of how we can use google alerts to help us in our daily tasks to track where our information is being sent out to.
Discussion ensued about Scroogle.org not to be confused with scoogle.com and how you can do secure searching though the site and that the site purges logs with in 48 hours.
A mention of Cisco was brought up and we also spoke of a visualized version for the Cisco Mips processors and the specific virtualized version of the Cisco 7200 Routers.
By now, most people know that you should have a complex password of at least 8 characters that are composed of upper case, lower case, numbers, punctuation marks and ,as Dilbert said, doodles, sign language and squirrel noises. Your password requirements are so secure that it would take a Beowulf cluster 10,000,000 years to crack. Your users know that if they write down their passwords on a post-it-note, they will be shot. Are your passwords secure?
The problem with a “good password” is that it is extremely difficult to remember. Passwords that are used daily can be easily remembered after a few days. Passwords that are used infrequently can be a point of vulnerability.
Unfortunately, password aging systems do not consider the frequency of use or the number of unsuccessful login attempts prior to a successful login. Sure, you can reset the error count before lockout after x number of minutes but, it treats all accounts equally. An attacker could come in “low and slow” by limiting password attempts to every 3 minutes.
If your password aging rules dictate that all passwords must be changed every 30 days, the password that is only used every two weeks will expire at the same interval as the password that is used 5 times per day. A better method for password aging systems would be to consider the number of times a password is used and maintain a counter of unsuccessful logins before a successful login in addition to a maximum password lifetime. How would this be an improvement?
If you have a complex password that is only used once every two weeks, you will probably need to write it down somewhere that is (hopefully) secure. If you don’t write it down, you may forget your password, requiring a password reset. Password resets are the unsung vulnerability in password management. Many organizations do not properly authenticate the person requesting a password reset, reset passwords to a default value, or send the new password to the user in an insecure method. Social engineering can often bypass the “authorized password requestor” list. Are your passwords really secure?
Politics is by no means our idea of entertainment when it comes to our blogs, however to see such a strong candidate pick a “technological bi-polar” candidate as the potential VP, it makes you wonder if McCain is already a winner.
Joe Biden was picked as Obama’s VP candidate if they are to take the White House this upcoming election. Apparently his views towards net neutrality, the RIAA, and anti-encryption are a little skewed over the past few years. I’m sure the EFF doesn’t think too highly of him either. Although he may have experience in foreign policy, how does that protect our rights here in the U.S. as he was a key player when it came to the Patriot Act amongst many other laws that passed through the Senate. Follow the links below to make your own assumption of our potential Vice President.
Thanks to Mubix for his posting on ZDNet, below you will find a link that describes all of the latest tools that were presented at Defcon 16. Use them at your own discretion and make sure you have permission if using them on an enterprise network! As Mubix has no control over the ZDnet posting, you can visit his site and keep up-to-date on the latest happenings.
