Attackr.com » Developer Portal for web designers, developers and programmers http://www.attackr.com Come To Share, Come To Learn Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:09:25 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 WordPress Security http://www.attackr.com/wordpress-security/ http://www.attackr.com/wordpress-security/#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2009 03:29:17 +0000 Karen http://www.attackr.com/?p=324 The Internet is great but unfortunately there are unscrupulous people who, for whatever reasons, will attack, hack, and cause havoc to your WordPress blog if you’re not taking steps to secure it.

The very first thing that you should always do is keep your WordPress blog upgraded to the latest version. Some people say don’t do this because plugins won’t work, etc. But my advice is this: plugins are a dime a dozen. It is far more important that you have the most recent tweaks to WordPress. A lot of time, WordPress upgrades are to fix security vulnerabilities.

Another thing you should do is install this WordPress plugin: Secure WordPress. What this does is hide the WordPress version number in your blog’s header, installs a blank index.html file in your plugins directory so people can’t snoop, and various other tweaks to prevent hackers from getting in easily.

It goes without saying that your password is another part of the equation when it comes to security. Create a good password that’s at least a 6 in password strength, and don’t write it down anywhere-memorize it! It’s a good idea to change your passwords on a regular basis, as well.

A lot of people make money from their WordPress blogs. Offline you would have security cameras, excellent locks, etc, installed in your business location, wouldn’t you? So it makes sense that you need to take the same precautions online.

The great thing about security online is that a lot of the time you don’t need to spend very much money. There is enough freely-available information and lots and lots of good people who create open source software. A lot of the time the software is superb. Wouldn’t you say WordPress itself is superb? You bet!

So just make sure you are vigilant. Implement the above procedures quickly and then you can spend the rest of your time building your blog with quality content and making money from it without worrying about security issues.

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/wordpress-security/feed/ 4 Testing Password Strength Using Google http://www.attackr.com/testing-password-strength-using-google/ http://www.attackr.com/testing-password-strength-using-google/#comments Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:59:02 +0000 James http://www.attackr.com/?p=207 Passwords are very important because with passwords we are able to protect our confidential data from being accessed by the wrong people. So that is why it is very important that we use a complex password BUT easy to remember when choosing your password.

As far as I know, strong passwords must contain numbers, letters and symbols. Have you chosen a strong password for example for your email account? Well then, let’s test whether that password is strong or not.

So how do you test it? The easy way is by using Google. I love Google since it has a lot of hidden services and hacks. Google has tried to help us by creating a new service (although not yet advertised) that will give a security rating for every password as follows:

  1. Not secure
  2. Adequate
  3. Could use some improvment
  4. This is secure

At this point, the page only shows the number relating to how secure the password is without any explanation of what it means, so bear in mind the score and refer to the legend above.

To see how secure your password is, use the form below. The response will be a number which you can compare to the list above to see how secure it is.

Original article.

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/testing-password-strength-using-google/feed/ 7 How to Write a Good Password http://www.attackr.com/how-to-write-a-good-password/ http://www.attackr.com/how-to-write-a-good-password/#comments Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:07:00 +0000 graystatic http://www.attackr.com/?p=180 Making passwords is something everybody on the web does.  The art is in making good, secure passwords that you can also remember easily.  There are two methods I have found really effective.  There are tons of passwords I use that I have to be able to recall at any time.  Most people would resort to making short passwords, writing passwords down, or using the same password for multiple things, these methods are horribly insecure.

The first way I have found very effective is to use phrases or sentences.  The phrase should be something rememberable and contain numbers too.  One example of this would be something like, “ilovemy1995thunderbird”, (I love my 1995 thunderbird).  This is 22 characters long, and pretty easy to remember.  The phrase should be something that makes sense to you.  So maybe if you were born in 1942, instead of resorting a typical password, which would just use your birthday and are guessable, turn it into a phrase like, “iwasbornin1942″, now you have a hard to guess, long, and easy to remember password.  This method is also very effective for passwords that have to be shared with others, using phrases will make it fairly easy for even forgetful people to remember.

My second method I commonly use for passwords is good to use on websites that you might not use a lot, and therefore are prone to forget the password.  What I will typically do with such a site is use a combination of the site name in a phrase.  So with a site such as yahoo you could have a password such as “ilikeyahooalot”, or for google maybe something like, “googleisreallygreat”.  Using this method you can also use it as a pattern so for attackr.com, using the previous pattern it would be “attackrisreallygreat”.  It is good to note that if you use such a pattern it would be potentially possible if someone discovered one of your passwords to guess the others.  However, this is fairly unlikely and better than reusing the same password over and over again, but not quite as secure as the first method.

Well I’ve used these methods fairly successfully for a while now and they have been a big help to me.  I hope they are of use to you too, enjoy.  Originally posted at graystatic.net/blog

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