Web service automates WordPress password cracking

Web service automates WordPress password cracking: "

Hackers have developed a distributed Wordpress admin account cracking scheme that poses a severe risk for the security of blogs whose owners select insecure passwords.

PHP scripts located on a virtual server run bruteforce (password guessing) attacks on targeted sites. Many sites can be attacked at the same time by the system, with results written into an associated database.

The SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Centre notes that brute force attacks against Wordpress are commonplace. The distributed nature of the latest attack marks an evolution towards blog hacking as a web service, however, thus marking it out from the crowd.

“While this particular version is relatively simple, the power behind the script and the MySQL database allows the attacker to distribute the attacks not only by sites, but also by passwords tried as well,” ISC security watcher Bojan Zdrnja writes.

Blog administrators are advised to use strong (hard to guess) passwords and to limiting access by IP address as a security precaution to prevent getting pwned.

Find the original article here.

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Hackers better exploit Facebook with new tools

Hackers better exploit Facebook with new tools: "New tools could enable targeted phishing

New tools capable of quickly finding, gathering and correlating information about individuals from social networking sites and other public sources are giving online scammers a powerful new weapon, say security researchers.

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The world looks different if you're depressed

The world looks different if you're depressed: "People with the condition find it easy to interpret large images or scenes, but struggle to 'spot the difference' in fine detail

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Guessing FTP passwords

Guessing FTP passwords: "

According the latest Microsoft’s researches guessing FTP passwords is still a valuable way to harvest account information. People still forget or ignore to change their default password or change it that way attackers can easily guess.

Microsoft releases password attack data

Microsoft released data collected from an FTP-server honeypot, showing that attempts to guess passwords continue to focus on the low-hanging fruit: passwords with an average length of eight characters, with “password” and “123456″ being the most common.

The data is part of a project to monitor attacks that everyday users might encounter on a regular basis. Most of the attacks attempted to log into the administrator account on English and French computers — “Administrator” and “Administrateur” were, by far, the two most popular usernames — using a variety of passwords. The attackers were typically compromised computer that were part of a botnet, Microsoft researchers stated on the company’s Malware Protection Center blog.

“You should take care of what user name and password you’re choosing,” the researchers wrote. “If your account has no limit on the number of login attempts, then knowing the user name is like having half the job done.”

In one case, an attacker made more than 400,000 attempts to guess a user name password combination.

The most common passwords were password, 123456, #!comment:, changeme and an expletive.

Microsoft recommended that users create passwords consisting of letters, numbers and special characters using a combination of lower and upper case. The average length of the password attacks was eight characters, so users should focus on longer passwords, the researchers stated.

You find the original article here.

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How Will You Die?

How Will You Die?: "

While you may be worried of catching of an obscure disease you heard about on the news, the truth is that we are far more likely to die of a small range of illnesses, nearly all of which are tied in some way to your lifestyle choices, like the food you eat or how much exercise you get. But you can lessen—sometimes dramatically—the likelihood of succumbing to the most common causes of death by knowing your risk factors and making informed choices. This is a look at your most likely cause of death (excluding uncontrollable events like accidents and homicide), given your race, sex, and age. Use this information to make choices that will keep you healthy.

A collaboration between GOOD and Way Shape Form, in partnership with GE.

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10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit

10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit: "

Over time certain conventions and best practices have been developed to help improve the general usability of websites during their design and build. This roundup of ten usability crimes highlights some of the most common mistakes or overlooked areas in web design and provides an alternative solution to help enhance the usability of your website.

Crime 1: Form labels that aren’t associated to form input fields

Using the ‘for’ attribute allows the user to click the label to select the appropriate input fields within a form. This is especially important for checkboxes and radio fields to give a larger clickable area, but it’s good practice all round.

Crime 2: A logo that doesn’t link to the homepage

Linking the logo of a website to the homepage has become common practice and is now second nature for (most) web surfers to expect the logo to head back home. It’s also worth mentioning the logo should appear in the top left.

Crime 3: Not specifying a visited link state

Visited link states do exactly as they say on the tin. It’s not the most advanced CSS selector, but it’s one that is often overlooked. Give users a visual clue as to which link has already been clicked.

Crime 4: Not indicating an active form field

You can use the ‘:focus’ selector on lots of elements, but it’s super handy when used on inputs and textareas to indicate that the field is active. Add CSS styling such as a highlighted border, or a subtle change to the background color.

Crime 5: An image without an alt description

This is straying a little into the realm of accessibility, but it’s still an important consideration! Remember to always add a descriptive alt attribute to your images, unless of course they are used for decorative purposes, then the ALT attribute can be left empty (but should still exist!). When using an image as a link, enter a description of where the link goes.

Crime 6: A background image without a background color

It’s common to use background images behind passages of text, but it’s worth remembering that if background images are disabled by the user, there needs to be a similar tone in the form of a background colour to avoid the text becoming unreadable.

Crime 7: Using long boring passages of content

There’s nothing more off-putting than landing on a webpage that’s laid out as a continuous passage of text. Break up your content with images, headings and clear sections to make it easier to scan, read and digest.

Crime 8: Underlining stuff that isn’t a link

Everyone knows that text that’s underlined, or is a different colour is likely to be a link. Don’t go confusing people by throwing in underlined text elsewhere! To draw attention to a certain word, try using the strong or emphasize tags instead.

Crime 9: Telling people to click here

The words click here have been around since the dawn of the Internet, but have been shunned aside in favour of more usable options. Using the words click here requires the user to read the whole sentence to find out what’s going to happen. Instead, describe what’s going to happen in the actual anchor link text.

Crime 10: Using justified text

This is another tip that’s heading a little deeper into accessibility but is also an important point to consider. Justified text might look at neat and square to the eye, but it can generate some real readability problems, particularly for Dyslexic users who can find it troublesome to identify words due to the uneven spacing of justified paragraphs.

Similar Posts

• 10 HTML Tag Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit


• 15 Must Read Articles for CSS Beginners


• How to Convert a Photoshop Mockup to XHTML/CSS


• How to Build a Simple Button with CSS Image Sprites

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Can Google succeed outside of search?

Can Google succeed outside of search?: "

Google is rich, with a market cap of $183 billion -- that's billion with a 'b' -- already 71 percent the value of its much more established archrival Microsoft. With those resources, Google has created more and more software products in an attempt to build a sustainable business outside of the search-based ads that account for most of its revenue -- and be the center of your computing universe.

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