password

What would it take to get you give up your office network password to a total stranger? In London, women were more likely than men to give over their password for a piece of chocolate, says researchers for Infosecurity Europe.

The survey was conducted among 576 office workers contacted outside the Liverpool Street Station in London. The good news is that, overall, just 21 percent of those questioned would give up their password, with 45 percent of women saying yes versus 10 percent of men. Last year, 64 percent of people surveyed said were prepared to give away their passwords … Read more

On Wednesday, VeriSign invited companies to join their VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP) Network by announcing the VIP Quick Start. As encouragement, vendors who sign up between now and September 30 will receive 5,000 free tokens to distribute to their customers. The customers can then use the tokens on any of the participating VIP sites.

VIP is part of a two-factor authentication process created by VeriSign. Customers are given tokens or cards that display a digital password that's time-synced with a server on the corporate bank end. When one goes to access the site, you simply enter the digital … Read more

In looking for a program to back up his Gmail account, programmer Dustin Brooks found a commercial program that instead copies username and password information, according to a blog on Codinghorror.com.

Over the weekend, Brooks said in an e-mail to CodingHorrror.com that he was looking for a program that would archive his Gmail account onto his local hard drive. He signed up for a program called G-Archiver distributed by Mate Media of Miami, Fla. Brooks says that after installing the program, it didn't do all he was looking for so he decided to reverse engineer the source … Read more

Recently, in the techie Q&A column in the New York Times, someone asked about changing the password in their router. Due to space limitations, the answer by J. D. Biersdorfer was short, too short. This is what you need to know.

Every router, wired or wireless, has an internal website used to make configuration changes. Accessing this internal website requires a userid/password, something totally independent of any wireless network passwords.

A year ago, in my prior blog, I discussed why it is so important to change the default router password (see Home routers can be dangerous. VERY dangerous). … Read more

Your first--and sometimes only--line of PC defense is your password. Even the most carefully crafted password can be rendered useless if you don't keep it secret. This is not such an easy thing to do, especially considering all the clever tricks data thieves have come up with to grab it, with or without your knowledge. More dangerous is the lackadaisical approach many people take to creating, using, and protecting their passwords. Here are 10 ways to use passwords to best effect.

1: Don't write it down. Ever. Either it will be so easy to find that you might … Read more

You trust Microsoft Office with your most important documents, spreadsheets, e-mail, and presentations. Unfortunately, many of the default security settings in Office applications may not provide a sufficient level of protection for your data, your system, and your reputation. Follow these steps to fine-tune the security settings in Office 2003; tomorrow I'll cover the new security options in Office 2007's Trust Center and elsewhere.

Office 2003 lets you encrypt files so that you need a password to read or edit them. In Word 2003, open the document and click Tools > Protect Document. To restrict the styles that … Read more

You probably know about the "hidden" administrator account in Windows XP. It's the only account on XP systems on which no other accounts have been created.

Until you add a new account, you zip right to the desktop when you boot the OS, with no stop at the Welcome screen. Once you set up one or more new accounts, the default administrator disappears, though you can bring it back in both XP Home and Pro. (More on this below.)

Vista ships with this account disabled, which is not such a bad thing because every user on the … Read more

The New York Times recently reported a heartwarming story about a lost digital camera being returned after a kindhearted stranger analyzed the photos on the camera to find the owner.

The camera was left in the backseat of a New York taxi, and contained sightseeing photos of Manhattan, as well as Florida snapshots including people wearing name tags. Leads took the hunt to Ireland, back to New York, and finally to Syndey, Australia, where the rightful owner lives. He was "over the moon" with gratitude to get his camera back.

This story has a happy ending, and perhaps most of us would be glad to get our camera back in that situation, but it also made me uneasy to realize how much personally identifiable information was stored on one camera card. I would rather have a locked camera than could not be accessed if it was found, than have a stranger be able to peer into my photos.

The situation is even more crucial when it involves smartphones.… Read more

Whenever you type an address into an Internet browser, that address is instantly resolved into the site's numerical Internet address by a DNS server located somewhere in the world. On Tuesday, Symantec announced that online criminals have started to remotely redirect your home network router's DNS server so that whenever you type in a financial institution or other trusted site, your browser will instead be redirected to a bogus or phishing Web site.

The practice, called pharming, usually attacks the DNS servers directly, but this latest attack brings it all home (if you are using broadband connectivity). Fortunately, … Read more