Archive for May, 2014

Ebay Hit By Hackers

Friday, May 23rd, 2014

So it seems that Ebay is the latest site in a long line of high profile web sites of well know companies to by hit by a hacker attack.

From memory, we’ve recently had Sony and it’s PlayStation network as well as several online gaming forums being attacked. In my opinion this just shows how vulnerable on line data is. If you use cloud storage for example, you’ll know that all you need to login to your user account is a username and a password. Now a username can be something like your email address and how secure is your password really? Is it a long complex string that mixes alphabetic, numeric and other characters like ‘LFKGjsdjg3293@£$sdhfj’ for example, or is it something like ‘pencil’ ?

There are applications called brute force programs (see Wikipedia link – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password_cracking) that will continually bombard web site pages where login details are added in an attempt to gain access to the system. A brute force program is able to attempt an unlimited amount of combinations in order to gain access. It all takes time, but brute force programs can try thousands of combinations a second. Scary isn’t it?

One of the most common passwords is the simple string ‘123456’. People will choose obvious passwords because they are easy to remember, but easy to remember passwords are also easy to break. 123456 became so popular and easy to break that in 2011 Microsoft banned its users using it as a password. So if you do use online services like cloud storage or ebay – make sure your passwords are secure and difficult break.