Tag: PASSWORD

The dweebs at Platform45 think a little pixelated peepshow will be enough to keep negligent surfers from using weak passwords. As your complexity increases, an 8-bit redhead loses her clothing, and eventually -- by combining upper and lower cases, letters and numbers -- ends up fully nude. 'Naked Password' is a bit of script intended for the backend of websites. (Try it out here.) Misogyny ...

Security researcher Brian Krebs is reporting that eHarmony's user database has been compromised, giving a rogue hacker access to information on thousands of the dating site's clients. According to Krebs, it appears that the breach was orchestrated by Chris Russo -- the Argentinian hacker who pulled off a similar heist on dating site Plentyoffish a few weeks ago. Russo, who prefers to call ...

Yesterday, Gawker announced that its servers had been hacked, and that more than a million of its user account passwords had been compromised. According to the site, all passwords were encrypted, but "simple ones may be vulnerable to a brute-force attack." Gawker recommended that all users change their passwords on its platform, and on any other site where they had used the same password. The ...

On Friday, police in California arrested and jailed a 23-year-old man accused of hacking into the e-mail accounts of more than 3,000 women and stealing sexually explicit photos of them. He allegedly sent the photos to his victims' e-mail contacts, and posted them to their Facebook profiles. The suspect, George Samuel Bronk, was arraigned Tuesday afternoon in a Sacramento County court, after a ...

Google knows that it messed up. In May, the company admitted to inadvertently collecting unencrypted Wi-Fi data with its fleet of Street View cars. Now, Google's offering a little more insight into what kind of information those cars actually gathered. When the scandal first broke last spring, Google wasn't entirely certain about what data it collected from unsuspecting Wi-Fi users -- it just ...

Users accessing Facebook from a public computer will no longer have to risk using their account passwords on potentially vulnerable platforms, thanks to a newly unveiled temporary password system. As Facebook explains on its blog, users can now request a temporary password when accessing the site from less trustworthy computers. All you have to do is text "otp" to 32665 from your cell phone, and ...

A U.K. teenager most recently employed at a fast food restaurant has been sentenced to 4 months in jail for refusing to give authorities the password to his computer. According to The Daily Mail, Oliver Drage, 19, would not give up his 50-character password, which authorities had requested as part of a child sexual exploitation investigation that has involved the teen since starting back in 2009. ...

As computers, and specifically graphics cards, have gotten more powerful, our passwords have become increasingly vulnerable, and the days of eight characters being the standard password length are over. To be honest, they have been over for quite some time, but it's only now that the rest of the world is coming to realize that those eight letters you use to protect your e-mail could be cracked by ...

Share We understand, better than most maybe, that it can be maddening to conjure and remember a bunch of passwords for a bunch of online services. Still, we manage. Granted, we do recycle some passwords, but we make sure never to register for a site with an e-mail address and that particular address's password. Unfortunately, according to a new study from BitDefender, 75-percent of Web users do ...

If you're bored and looking for a semi-productive way to kill time, head over to the site 'How Secure is my Password?,' where you can spend a few quality minutes test-driving new, ultra-impermeable passwords. We have no idea how accurate or scientific this is, but it looks as if it's been created by a repentant ex-hacker. After typing in any random word or combination of characters, the tool will ...

As much as we love new technology here at Switched, we also sort of hate it. No matter how cool, innovative, or flat out mind-blowing a new device may be, it's equally frustrating when our gadgets, for whatever reason, fail us. But what are the most common issues people have with technology? According to a recent report, they're pretty basic. Consumer Reports recently surveyed over 13,000 of ...

Share If you get an e-mail with a subject line that reads, "Facebook password reset confirmation customer support," you can just go ahead and hit the delete button. That's because, if you open it, you may fall prey to the latest scam to hit Facebook, and divulge intensely personal password or banking information. The malicious e-mail bears an attachment that, the message claims, contains your ...

This morning, many Twitter users found themselves effectively locked out of their accounts. Following a phishing attack, Twitter took the unprecedented measure of locking down several users' accounts and requiring them to reset their passwords. The owners of the accounts were sent messages that read, "Due to concern that your account may have been compromised in a phishing attack that took place ...

What it is: Share KeePass, along with its innumerable (and unofficial) ports, is one of the best and most flexible password managers available. In order to keep your various accounts and log-in information safe, it's strongly encouraged that you not only choose difficult-to-guess passwords, but that you also use a different password for every account. The problem with that method, though, is ...

We thought we had this all sorted out some time ago. If you choose an easy-to-guess password -- like, say "123456" -- it puts your accounts and personal data in danger. So we were horrified a few months ago when a sampling of 10,000 hacked Hotmail, MSN, and Live.com accounts revealed that the most popular password was, in fact, "123456." But, like most other tech blogs and magazines, we rushed ...