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No password is safe from new breed of cracking software

2013-10-29/2 Comments/in General Security/by SecurityOrb_Staff

No password is safe from new breed of cracking software

Hackers target President Obama’s social media tools

2013-10-29/0 Comments/in General Security/by SecurityOrb_Staff

The political activist hackers of the Syrian Electronic Army are at it again, targeting one of the highest-profile users of social media in the world: President Obama. But SEA’s claims of commandeering his Twitter account aren’t quite accurate

No password is safe from new breed of cracking software

2013-10-29/2 Comments/in General Security/by SecurityOrb_Staff

No password is safe from new breed of cracking software

Hackers target President Obama’s social media tools

2013-10-29/0 Comments/in General Security/by SecurityOrb_Staff

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No password is safe from new breed of cracking software

2013-10-29/2 Comments/in General Security/by SecurityOrb_Staff

This article originally appeared on The Daily Dot.

Chances are you need to change your password. No matter how long it is.

Over the weekend, the free password cracking and recovery tool oclHashcat-plus released a new version, 0.15, that can handle passwords up to 55 characters. It works by guessing a lot of common letter combinations. A lot. Really really fast.

Other long-string password-crackers exist, such as Hashcat and oclHashcat-lite, though they take a great deal more time to cycle through. This improvement runs at 8 million guesses per second while also allowing users to cut down the number of guesses required by shaping their attacks based on the password-construction protocol followed by a company or group.

A combination of increasing awareness of official scrutiny, such as the NSA leaks, growing instances of hacking of all kinds and leaked password lists, has inspired users to radically lengthen their passwords and use passphrases instead.

As Dan Goodin noted in Ars Technica, “Crackers have responded by expanding the dictionaries they maintain to include phrases and word combinations found in the Bible, common literature, and in online discussions.”

Hackers target President Obama’s social media tools

2013-10-29/0 Comments/in General Security/by SecurityOrb_Staff

For a few hours, posts on the President’s Facebook and Twitter accounts directed users to YouTube videos uploaded by SEA, and to the SEA website itself. The hackers also posted an image of a Gmail inbox belonging to an employee of Organizing for Action, an official promotional website for President Obama’s various political initiatives.

On the face of it, this looks like a very serious hack of the President’s accounts — but in fact, neither of those accounts was actually compromised, an OFA official told the Associated Press. Like its other high-profile attacks over the last year (The New York Times, Washington Post, and Guardian, among others), SEA’s technique was deceptively unsophisticated.

Instead of coding a special virus or decrypting critical communications, the SEA in all cases manages to get hold of the username and password of someone related to the website or account in question, and simply logs in with their credentials.

Read the rest here.