Subscribe in a readerCommon Passwords
Security companies sometimes get to analyse real people’s passwords and create interesting reports. Imperva has just done that, analysing 32 million passwords used on the Rockyou.com site (which was recently hacked).
Below is a summary of their findings. Why is this important to you? Because it means that statistically, you probably have a weak password that can be guessed.
- 41% of passwords only use lower case letters (weak)
- 15% of passwords only user numerals (even weaker)
- Nearly 50% of people used names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial words as their passwords. These can be guessed in seconds by a “brute force” program.
The ten most common passwords were:
- 123456
- 12345
- 123456789
- Password
- iloveyou
- princess
- rockyou
- 1234567
- 12345678
- abc123
If you use any of these as your password then change it now, it’s too easy to guess, especially now that everyone can see this list.
For tips on how to choose a good password read our previous article. And here are some tips on testing how good your password is.
Imperva’s complete report is here. It’s full of interesting technical details on what they found and what the risks are.
Malware Statistics
Avast! is a company that makes a decent anti-virus program. They recently published some statistics that are interesting:
- Their anti-virus programs blocks 1 billion malware a month. That’s 1,000,000,000 attempts to install viruses, trojans, password stealers, etc on to people’s PCs. A month. And that’s just by one small company.
- 1 in 15 people encounter a malware every day.
- They find about 3,000 new malware each day (that’s new and unique viruses, trojans, etc). They have 2.1 million in their database.
These statistics are not just marketing numbers, they give you an idea of how serious a problem malware is. If you don’t have a good anti-virus system installed on your computer they you need to take action now (today) and install something to protect you. Good anti-virus systems generally cost money – it’s a good investment, the cost of not buying one is usually greater.
And get something from a known vendor. Last week I talked about a comparison of anti-virus programs, you can use this as a guide.
And Macs and Linux computers aren’t safe either.
Spam Sentences
A quick post about spam. Some of the most common sentenced used in spam are:
- We are letting you try it for FREE, you just pay the shipping costs!
- FREE Download without limits!
- Get your Free Trial Now!
- Take FREE exotic vacations!
- Get Free trial bottle!
In similar news, Norton has published a list of what they consider the top 100 most dangerous web sites. I won’t copy & paste the names here because my site and newsletter will no doubt be blocked by filters everywhere. You can have a look here to get an idea of what they consider to be highly dangerous web sites.
FIFA World Cup Lottery Scam
The FIFA World Cup is scheduled for 2010 in South Africa and scammers have already started using this news to trick people into giving out their personal details.
A new scam email is sent to people telling them they won a lottery. The email is full of interesting things to catch people’s attention such as a large dollar amount ($850,000) and social tricks such as asking them not to tell anyone about their winnings.
At the end they ask the recipient to send them a few personal details, which the scammers then use to steal money from your bank accounts.
The email uses broken English and is full of "official looking" random letters and numbers.
Below are some quotes from the scam email. If you receive this email just delete it.
South Africa FIFA World Cup 2010
Government Accredited Licensed!!
Online National Lottery South African
2009/REF:EAASL/941OYI/04&
Batch: 12/25/DC34 RE:LOTTOYour email have luckily won the sum of USD$850,000.00
Which subsequently won you the lottery in the 2nd category i.e. match 5 plus bonus. You have therefore been approved to claim a total sum of $850,000.00 USD… In cash credited to file KPC/9080118308/02. All participants for the online version were selected randomly from World Wide Web sites through computer draw system and extracted from over 100,000 union associations and corporate bodies that are listed online this promotion takes place weekly.
Our agent will immediately commence the process to facilitate the release of your funds as soon as you contact him. For security reasons, you are advised to keep your winning information confidential till your claims is processed and your money remitted to you in whatever manner you deem fit to claim your prize. This is part of our precautionary measure to avoid double claiming and unwarranted abuse of this program your request to fill the information below.
And it goes on and on.
Some people who fall for these things have never entered a lottery, but they want to believe it so much that they don’t stop to consider why they were selected.
Now you might be wondering who could possibly be so foolish to fall for lottery scams. In fact, a large number of people fall for these things. In Australia alone (and with a small population of 21 million) 329,000 people lost money to lottery and phishing scams in one year. 3.6 million people fell for these scams in USA. Imagine how many people worldwide fall for these things.
Not everyone in the world reads Fraudo.com. You can help by talking to people about lottery scams, making them aware of what they are and how they work (there’s more information here). Help educate people, especially those who are less tech savvy or might be desperate for money. You could also help them subscribe to Fraudo.com – get them to enter their email address in the top right corner of this page, sometimes email is an easier way to receive these updates.
A New Year
It’s now 2009. I started this site in 2007 with the intention of helping people understand online fraud. Things are coming along nicely.
In 2008:
- I published 174 new articles on this site (for a total of 229 articles). My goal was 200 new articles so I’ve slacked a bit.
- 8493 people used Fraudo.com when looking for information about scams, fraud, etc.
- 576 people wanted to know if it’s ok to give out their bank account details to strangers (I answered this question here)
I also introduced an email subscription service. Enter your email address in the top right corner of this page and you’ll receive an email with all the latest updates.
Fraud, scams, and viruses are bigger problems than ever so I’ll continue my efforts on this site. The best way to overcome these dangers is through education, so continue reading this site and let everyone know about it.
All the best for 2009,
Enrique.
Is WPA Still Secure?
There was a media announcement recently from a Russian company called Elcomsoft claiming to be able to crack WPA encryption. What’s this about and how does it affect you?
WPA is the preferred encryption for wireless networks, the kind you probably have at home or in the office. Here’s a quick recap of where WPA fits in:
- WEP – the old wireless security option. This is useless, it provides no real security.
- WPA – this replaced WEP. Some old devices didn’t support it but most new ones do. WPA is good, highly recommended.
- WPA2 – this is better than WPA
So what did Elcomsoft do?
They developed a way to speed up the time it takes to crack WPA and WPA2 encryption. Here’s a short summary:
- If you use a short password, say 10 letters long, it used to take 579,000 years to crack. With this new technology it would now take 5793 years, or 5 years if they purchase 1000 of these machines dedicated to hacking into your wireless network (at a cost of over $1m of hardware).
- If you use a good password, e.g. 20 characters long, will now take 10,000,000,000,000 years to crack, or shorter if you have thousands of computers working together on this.
In other words the article is mostly hype. Making something 100 faster doesn’t mean much when we’re talking about trillions of years.
The short version is: use WPA/WPA2 and a long password when configuring your wireless network. Use at least 20 characters.
Further:
What I’ve written above applies to small networks such as home or small offices. For large networks you should be using a technology called Radius together with WPA, this is much more secure, extremely hard to crack, and of course more complicated and expensive to install and maintain.
630,000 Laptops Lost at Airports Each Year
Another amazing statistic – across 46 states in USA there were more than 630,000 laptop computers reported lost in the past year. That’s more than 12,000 a week. And when you consider that most people still keep documents on their laptop computer when they travel they haven’t just lost a piece of hardware, they’ve potentially lost control of private and confidential documents.
What can you do?
Laptops can be insured. Anyone who carries a laptop around for work would have it insured, it’s just a cost of doing business. Nothing new here.
As for the documents stored on them, delete them before you travel!. If this sounds extreme then you need to wake up and realise what’s happening in the world.
At many airport security checkpoints customs officers now have the authority to look at the contents of your laptop’s hard drive before they let you board the plane or enter a country. And they don’t always just "look" – sometimes they make a copy of your hard drive so they can look more closely at a later time. Is this legal? Yes, in some places (including most US airports today). Read more about this in this article.
So you now have two reasons to delete all documents from a laptop before travelling:
- You could lose your laptop (like 630,000 other people each year in one country alone).
- You could be asked to hand over your laptop’s data to customs officers.
What a lot of large organisations do these days is hand their employees "clean" laptops that have no documents on them. Employees are given VPN access, so when they arrive at their destination they can access their office network and carry on with their regular work. If you’re new to the concept of a VPN read our previous article on its benefits. Another trick is to carry your files on a USB flash drive, and hide it in your wallet or luggage. This could be encrypted as well for security, in case you lose it.
Whole disk encryption is another technology that can help you with lost laptops. Whole disk encryption makes the entire contents of the laptop useless without a password. There’s no known way to recover the data. There are still two risks with this method:
- You need the support of your IT department to ensure your organisation can restore your data in case you lose the password. Encryption management is not difficult for IT departments. For individuals it can be a burden.
- If customs officers insist on seeing the contents of your laptop’s files you need to hand over the password, and they get to read and even copy your files. This is legal in most western countries, it’s not enough to tell them you forgot the password.
Now if you’re thinking that your laptop needs a password to startup and that this is enough to stop people, remember that the files on your laptop’s hard drive can be copied without a password. You just need to pull out the hard drive (easy to do with laptops). Whole disk encryption is the only effective password protection for laptops.
And while we’re talking about travelling now’s a good time to remind you not to trust free or hotel wireless networks. You never know who’s monitoring the network traffic (read our previous article on this).
Read the study on lost laptops here, sponsored by Dell.
So in summary:
- Insure your laptop to recover the cost of the hardware and software
- Delete all files from the laptop before you travel. Use another technique to gain access to them when you arrive (either a VPN or a hidden and encrypted USB flash drive).
Don’t use old browsers
A new report has concluded that 637 million people are using out of date web browsers. This is bad.
Old web browsers have security flaws and vulnerabilities. You’re meant to update your web browser to the latest version because the developers have worked hard to patch it and fix up security holes. And in almost every case an upgrade is completely free. Why would anyone choose to use an old browser?
There are no legal obligations to upgrade a web browser but with this many people ignoring the very simple task of upgrading maybe it’s time for something to change. Now’s a good time to check for updates (the option is often in the Tools menu of the browser you’re using right now).
The report is here.
New Fraud Statistics
Sometimes it’s hard to believe these statistics, the numbers are so large. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has finished their first survey of personal fraud. Their findings are that 800,000 Australians fell victim to fraud in some way.
453,100 of those lost money, for a total of $977 million. That’s a lot of people and a lot of money for a rather small population.
329,000 Australians lost money after responding to lottery scams and other phishing related scams.
A lot of people keep falling for scams. The best thing you can do is help them become aware of what scams and fraud tricks are being used. Remember that you can always subscribe to Fraudo.com by email or with an RSS reader.
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