Twitter the micro blogging social network site, founded in 2006, has banned 370 words for security reasons. Words like 123456, porsche, ferrari, chelsea, arsenal have been banned and users cannot use it as passwords. They state that these common passwords increase the risk of hacking and phishing.

How did they get the list of these words?

Is it that majority of the 25 million users of twitter use these passwords? Or is it from a general survey done across all web based applications? How will it

help?

Better way to manage passwords:

Use Alpha-numeric-symbol passwords which would be extremely difficult to hack. If you find it difficult to remember such passwords, just draft a document wherein you have documented such passwords and mail it to

yourself. If possible encrypt it and document. e.g. use the subsequent letter for each letter and then save (instead of TWITTER save it as UXJUUFS). Just churn your brain and you can fight back hacking.

Password management is a new technique to remember/document passwords, which can be accesses anywhere and anytime. Think from the hacker’s point of view and trick them!

Rogues

Cloud AV is the future in Anti virus technology .Soon desktop anti virus software could become history. Here’s are the details .Currently Anti virus software is installed on every end users machine in an organization. This limits only one anti virus could be installed one system. Every anti virus package has some vulnerability and if the hacker is able to exploit it, the organization’s security is compromised.

Statistics show that F-Secure have a detection rate of 86% whereas McAfee only detects 54% pf the viruses. Also they have a slow response time to a solution to a new virus. Thus newer virus often takes days before they are detected. On an average, a new virus is undetected for almost seven weeks.

Cloud AV moves the anti virus functionality into the “network cloud” and off personal computers. Cloud AV analyzes suspicious files using multiple anti virus and behavioral detection programs simultaneously. By parallel detection with multiple anti virus engines, Could AV is able to increases the overall protection. All Detecting software on cloud AV works in its own virtual machine thus overcoming the constraint of one anti virus on machine.

“Agent software” needs to be installed on every end user machine, which sends any new files or devices directly to the Cloud AV network for analysis. Cloud AV would use 12 different defectors to verify the contents and notify the “agent software to improve performance, Cloud AV also caches the analysis results .Also whenever a new threat is identified, All machines are retrospectively scanned.

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Google gadgets – A Hacking Tool ?

Technorati : antivrus

This is one of the biggest problems of the Web 2.0, as this over sharing of gadgets could increase the security risks and open new doors for hackers. The users are creating their own customized applications and distributing it through Google, thus Google cannot be blamed for any security breaches. But users download everything from Google with complete trust. So do they have to fear?

According to the experts, since there is no moderation to the uploads, its almost impossible to know whether a gadget is legitimate or not.
According to Google, they scan all the gadgets regularly and that such gadgets being uploaded is very rare. In case such an instance is found, the gadget is immediately blacklisted. According to Google, no malicious gadgets were created in 2007. A quite impressive piece of statistics but the findings of Robert would certainly make me think twice next time I download something from Google.

Technorati : google, hacking