I tried to post this next story Monday night but was unable to beat WordPress before their maintenance. So it is now Tuesday morning. My KC Chiefs won this past Sunday. Offense didn’t look good at all. Not sure if it is me or not, but I thought the play calling wasn’t imaginative at all. But a win is a win. I still think this may be a long season. Now back to passwords sucking.
Passwords for the most part suck. Let’s admit it. If your password is a word in the dictionary, it can be cracked quickly. I give talks about computer security and when I ask when is the last time they changed a password on an email account or lets say….a PayPal account and the normal answer is they haven’t. Then when I follow up with the question, do they use a strong password? Well you can guess the answer to that one. People complain that they can’t remember a complex password. Trust me, it isn’t that hard. To truly have a strong password, you need to use upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special symbols.
Being in the business, I hear this all the time. Plus the longer you make the password the better. Here are examples of bad passwords. kujayhawks, ksuwildcats, kcchiefs, admin, password, 1234, asdf, etc.. By chance, lets say,we wanted to create a complex password. Using upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters you can build a password like P@s$w0rd. I would not advise you to use this but you get my point. Easy to remember. If you have an account that you really want to protect, you might look at creating a pass phrase. String out a 30 character password by using a combination of words. Substitute numbers and special characters, and use upper and lower. The longer the password, the longer it takes to crack. The shorter it is, the easier to crack.
So if you haven’t changed your P@s$w0rds in a long time, maybe you ought to think about doing just that. The longer the password, the better it will be. Remember, if some how your PC is pwned by an attacker, then there is a good chance you have a keylogger installed that will record and send off to the bad guy’s remote server somewhere in the WWW. It takes many steps to keep you safe. Not sure what we’ll talk about next posting but I have several ideas. Rememberdontu$ep@$Sw0rdsTh@tsUCk. There is a good complex password for you! You get my point I’m sure. Talk soon.
So you are sitting at home, and you wonder hey, what is my SSID name? If you have a wireless access point, it has a name, and you have the option to either broadcast that name so others can see you, or not to broadcast your SSID and you can be stealth like. If you have a laptop and your have used wireless before, you know you can view networks to connect to in the Windows Operating System. The networks that show up in that window are ones that have chosen to be broadcast. There are ways to find SSID’s that aren’t broadcast (Kismet), but this article is about how you can find it.
If you purchased a wireless router and you just took it out of the box and then you plugged it in, you probably have an SSID that is the default name the company that made the AP decided to put in all their routers. For example, you can find many wireless access points with the SSID name of ‘Linksys’. Along with this, they have a default userid and password assigned to it. For security purposes, you really need to change all these names. Here is a little ‘how to’ on the administration of routers in general.
First of all, if you are guilty of just plugging in the router and not changing any of these settings, then here is what you can do. You can actually log into your router by using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Look up in your documentation that came with your router to know the IP address that it uses. For example, Linksys routers use 192.168.1.1 for their internal IP address. Other routers sometimes use 192.168.0.1. So in MSIE, you would enter the address ‘http://192.168.1.1′. What you should be presented by is something like login screen that has a user name and password. Here is where you either look this information up in the router documentation or Google the type of router you have for this information. Also, you can reference a site I always have handy that tells you the default router userid’s and passwords (http://routerpasswords.com). This is another reason why you want to change these. Everyone has access to these if they know where to look. Some vendors don’t allow you to change the userid, but you can change the password.
Once you have logged in, you can change these values for security purposes. If you are logging into a wireless AP, here is where you can decide to either broadcast your SSID or not. Also you can change the name also. I advise all people to change the name of the SSID and also not to broadcast it. Change the password to a strong password to help protect yourself from someone doing cyber eavesdropping on you and your private information.
Learn to protect your information. It takes just a bit of work but it is worth it.
