passwords

Microsoft's online store in India was hacked on Sunday, resulting in the theft of usernames and passwords of the site's customers.

A Chinese group of hackers calling itself Evil Shadow Team took credit for the hack, posting screenshots of obscured usernames and passwords that it found unencrypted on the site, according to Reuters. The group touted the attack on its own blog (here's an English translation). posting a screenshot of the hacked Web site with the message: "Unsafe system will be baptized."

Microsoft has since taken down the hacked site and replaced it with a … Read more

Apple offers a number of options for securing your data on a Mac, including enabling FileVault for whole disk encryption in Lion (or home folder encryption in prior versions of OS X), and encrypted disk images for securing collections of documents.

In addition, as with other software developers, Apple has included options to secure individual documents for some of its programs, such as those in its iWork productivity suite.

To do this in iWork, create or open a document in Pages, Numbers, or Keynote, and then open the inspector window by clicking its icon in the toolbar or by pressing … Read more

Some HTC smartphone users may find their Wi-Fi passwords and other information exposed due to a new bug, but the company is rolling out a fix.

The vulnerability leaks Wi-Fi credentials and SSID (network name) details to any application with basic Wi-Fi permissions on several HTC handsets, according to an alert issued yesterday by the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT). As a result, an attacker using the right application can potentially capture and harness the information to hack into the user's network.

The affected phones include:

Security is required everywhere, be it for logging in to your computer, accessing e-mail, or accessing Web services such as banking or social media. At the root of the security is, of course, your password to access these services.

While being able to remember a password is hard enough, warranting tools like 1Password and Apple's Keychain to help store them, another area of frustration is attempting to come up with a good and secure password, or at least being able to check those you already have. In general, the more complex and long a password is, the better; however, … Read more

The Internet is a place where innocence goes to die.

Yes, it's also mankind's greatest repository of collected knowledge--but some of the Internet's knowledge might be a little inappropriate for young minds.

In spite of this, Web browsers have quickly blanketed my home over the past few years. They're on my phone, my TV, my computer, my tablet, and apparently coming soon to my refrigerator. As the father of a 4-year-old, I run our house like digital-era Holden Caulfield, disabling or password-protecting the browser on every gadget I can own.

It's not even the Web'… Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which we answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week people wrote in with questions about how best to search for past MacFixIt articles, an iPhone not properly controlling Keynote, external drives not formatting, resetting a blank Admin password, and how to run iPhone and iPad applications on the Mac. We continually answer e-mail questions, and though we present answers here, we welcome alternative approaches and views from readers and encourage you to post your own suggestions in the comments.

Question: Searching for past MacFixIt articles MacFixIt reader "lloyd" asks:

In a recent patent application uncovered by The Apple Blog, Apple has detailed a system for allowing your power adapter to become a security key for your password recovery process.

In basic terms, should you forget your password, an onscreen recovery application would prompt you to plug in your specific power adapter to confirm your identity. That adapter would store the necessary passwords and give you access to them when needed.

Current security measures, such as sending a verification e-mail or answering security questions are easily attacked by hackers who have managed to create any number of very sophisticated applications … Read more

Wi-Fi passwords help maintain a level of browsing privacy and keep strangers or neighbors from stealing your bandwidth.

If you aren't in charge of your network, or rarely add new devices to it, you might forget what security key you picked. Retrieving this can be easy if you can access the admin panel of the router, but this isn't always an option-- like when you aren't in charge of the network, or you forgot that password too. Fortunately there's an easy-to-use program that can retrieve the security information for networks saved on your computer. Just follow … Read more

Passwords are a way of life for nearly everybody who uses any kind of software. No viable alternative is imminent: fingerprint readers, retina scanners, voice identification, and USB tokens all have limitations. Nothing is as simple and inexpensive as an old-fashioned string of keystrokes.

Web services and network managers nearly always require a minimum degree of password difficulty to prevent standard password-cracking techniques from guessing them quickly. We're also cautioned not to reuse the same passphrases on different sites and are routinely blocked from recycling the passwords we've used previously.

Considering the number of times PC users sign … Read more