How to protect your PC against devious security traps. Securing your PC against the malicious wilds of the Web isn’t as simple as just keeping your antivirus software of choice up-to-date. In fact, the pervasiveness of security software has forced the bad guys to turn to increasingly clever tricks in their quest to “pwn” your PC. But fear not! Those sneaky tricks are most effective if victims are unaware of the danger.
And today, dear reader, I’m going to show you how to avoid the most devious PC security traps, because in this case knowing is more than half the battle. Phishing Let’s start with the devious attack you’re most likely to encounter during your day-to-day computing. Phishing websites mimic the look of another site in an attempt to lure you into entering your personal and account information. One simple tell gives away a phishing site: The URL doesn’t match the URL of the website you think it is. Beyond that, most social media and banking websites use HTTPS encryption by default.
Malicious email Scammers and hackers love email. Fundamentals of Information Security. Security Information. Privacy & Security 2. H@cking. Ethical Hacking. About Hackers & Hacks. Computer Security. Krebs on Security. IT Security News. Virtual private network. VPN connectivity overview A virtual private network connection across the Internet is similar to a wide area network (WAN) link between sites. From a user perspective, the extended network resources are accessed in the same way as resources available within the private network.[2] VPNs allow employees to securely access their company's intranet while traveling outside the office.
Similarly, VPNs securely connect geographically disparate offices of an organization, creating one cohesive network. VPN technology is also used by Internet users to connect to proxy servers for the purpose of protecting personal identity and location. Types[edit] Early data networks allowed VPN-style remote connectivity through dial-up modems or through leased line connections utilizing Frame Relay and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) virtual circuits, provisioned through a network owned and operated by telecommunication carriers. VPN systems may be classified by: Security mechanisms[edit] Authentication[edit]
Cyber citizenship. Brute-force attack. The EFF's US$250,000 DEScracking machine contained over 1,800 custom chips and could brute-force a DES key in a matter of days. The photograph shows a DES Cracker circuit board fitted on both sides with 64 Deep Crack chips. When password guessing, this method is very fast when used to check all short passwords, but for longer passwords other methods such as the dictionary attack are used because of the time a brute-force search takes. When key guessing, the key length used in the cipher determines the practical feasibility of performing a brute-force attack, with longer keys exponentially more difficult to crack than shorter ones. A cipher with a key length of N bits can be broken in a worst-case time proportional to 2N and an average time of half that.
Brute-force attacks can be made less effective by obfuscating the data to be encoded, something that makes it more difficult for an attacker to recognize when he/she has cracked the code. Theoretical limits[edit] Credential recycling[edit]