Originally Posted by TomJ

Would this be a good time for me to pipe up with my favorite methods for coming up with memeorable strong passworeds? Yes? Alrighty then...

Take a phrase you know well and are unlikely to forget; a quotation or lyric is often good. Let us take something from George Orwell:

Four legs good, two legs bad!

Now all we have to do is take the first letters:

Flgtlb

Flor extra strength, we can keep the punctuation ad us numeral where appropriate:

4lg,2lb!

You can use other rebus type techniques to get an approriately strong yet memorable password. One I used for a while was the opening of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

it is an anicient mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.

which became:

IiaAM,&hs1/3.

Lets see a dictionary attack break that one... not that I can use it any more having shared it, but you see the point.

Originally Posted by juise-

I just managed to reset my Yahoo password, knowing only my username, date of birth, country, zip code, and my father's middle name. No hacking necessary. If I can do it, someone else can do it too.

All of that is stuff that can be easily obtained by someone who knows me.

I'd recommend using some safer solution for e-mail. (I don't use Yahoo for mail myself, but Flickr requires a Yahoo ID). Or answering wrong to those stupid "safety" questions (in a way you can remember).

Also, your username and password probably have been compromised by something much more common than WiFi eavesdropping. Maybe your PC has a keylogger trojan. Or some other place you've been accessing your mailbox at.

Or maybe you've typed your username and password to a website after clicking a link in e-mail you just received. And that happened to be a phishing site. (Almost happened to me once, with some very authentic looking FB notification. I only noticed the trick, wrong URL on the address bar, because the e-mail field was pre-filled with some strange address.)

Unfortunately, https won't protect any of the above.

A Swiss security company called Objectif Sécurité has created a cracking technology that uses rainbow tables on SSD drives.

Apparently it is the hard drive access time and not the processor speed that slows down cracking speed. So using SSD drives can make cracking faster, but just how fast?

One article in March of this year stated that the technique using SSD drives could crack passwords at a rate of 300 billion passwords a second, and could decode complex password in under 5.3 seconds.

Originally Posted by Texrat

Oops... this is scary:



http://cyberarms.wordpress.com/2010/...-in-5-seconds/