Have Laptop Will Travel

Good question

Originally posted on January 31, 2004 @ 10:22 am

If the professor on Giligan’s Island can make a radio out of coconut, why can’t he fix a hole in a boat?

Yikes

Originally posted on September 2, 2004 @ 6:57 am

It’s 6:57am and I am awake, showered and dressed… yikes!

I actually went to bed at 10pm last night. I never go to bed that early.

The past month or so I’ve been going non stop… work, work, work and more work… so I guess my body finally said “hey you, get some rest or else”.

Sleep is a wonderful thing. I forgot how nice good sleep is… yay for sleep.

P.S. Welcome to September.

What motivates a computer criminal?

Originally posted on March 4, 2004 @ 2:49 pm

What motivates a computer criminal? The answer is: MEECES. What does MEECES stand for?

Money: Stolen credit cards become currency for certain crime rings and social groups of carders who trade them for access to other compromised credit card databases.

Ego: Spanning the entire spectrum of the community from black hat to white hat hackers, ego is the drive to solve a problem, look inside the code, see how something works, and then get it to do something it wasn’t created to do.

Entertainment: The bored teenager syndrome is not as strong as in the days of big disk drives and mainframes, but it remains a motivator. “You’ll still see a hacker break into a system, trash it up and sit back and watch the system administrator scurry around trying to save it,” Kilger says.

Cause: Think hactivism, mostly Web site defacements and distributed denial-of-service attacks for politics and ideologies.

Entrance into social groups: Hackers achieve this by sharing their successful break-ins with the groups they want to be included in.

Status: This is the strongest motivator among all hackers, crackers and carders because their main emphasis is on skills. The higher profile the target, the higher their status.

Safeguard Your Passwords

Originally posted on March 1, 2004 @ 9:05 pm

Tonight’s hack post… how to create hack-proof passwords so you can feel safe about your computer.

Tips to create hack-proof passwords:

1. Never, ever use whole words. If the word exists in the dictionary, it can be easily hacked.

2. Combine special symbols with numbers and upper and lowercase characters. Examples: n$iK@07 or 8*neB#kc.

3. Make sure your passwords are at least six to eight characters.

You’ve followed my tips, and now you have a hack-proof password. The problem is that your cryptic passwords are hard to remember. Seriously, are you really going to remember “n$iK@07”? I’m not. You need somewhere to store your passwords.

Password management:

If you’re like me, you have a dozen or so passwords for various websites, applications, networks, and so on. Now that you’ve changed each password using my tips, you need someplace to store them. Safely.

I recommend and use the following: Password Safe. This is an open-source project, a database that encrypts each individual password.

The Pros: Since it’s an open-source project, anyone can look at the source code of the application (there are no hidden backdoors), based on strong Blowfish encryption, auto-generates strong passwords, free.

The Cons: Interface needs work