a4apphack

How to choose a strong and secure password? The obvious answer is to choose a very long password and the next answer in the list is to include as much special characters as possible. But doing so would make it more difficult to remember and would even force us to jot it in postits.

But the ideal solution would be to choose a password which takes longer time to crack. Hackers can find someway to crack our password, all we have to make them try stronger and harder. Passwords are usually cracked using a method called as Bruteforce attack where a malicious tool tries to match all the type of password combination available against the target system. More complex the password is, more are the combinations to be tried and less probable it becomes for the tool to guess our password right.

This website, HowSecureIsMyPassword, gives us an idea on how long it takes to crack a password with a normal desktop PC. We can try various combinations, longer password/different character sets and analyze the results.

So as mentioned earlier we should choose a password which takes at least more than ‘a year’ to crack. This arbitrary value – ‘a year’ is based on the assumption that we would change our passwords once in every year so by the time the cracker obtains our password, we would have changed it

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Phishing techniques are becoming more popular and advanced that some phished sites seems visually challenging to be separated from its genuine counterpart.

Read this post about Indian Income Tax phishing site.

Take these Phishing quizzes to sharpen your skills to identify the fake sites.

1. Verisign’s – Phish No Phish

URL: https://www.phish-no-phish.com

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Backtrack is the most popularly used security distro used while during pentests. While we can partition our harddisk, install this OS and dual boot with our default OS; things can be made simpler by running BackTrack VM within our default OS. Using a security distro in a VM gives us few advantages like, portability & ability to quickly restore/duplicate the instances as required.

Running Backtrack

BackTrack4 VM can be downloaded from the backtrack site (link at the end of the post) and to run the VM, we need the free VMWare Player.

Install the VMWare Player and open the BT VM with it. We are good to go with the default configuration unless we have more RAM to spare (Its recommended to provide 512MB of RAM if you have around 2GB).

Adjust Backtrack VM RAM

Default Credentials

Backtrack VM comes with the default login credentials (which can be changed later, ofcourse)

bt login:  root
Password:  toor
. . .
root@bt:~#  startx

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