Password Security and Hacks

Are you aware about your Password Security?

If not then this is probably the time to think about it in a serious manner. According to a study conducted the top ten most used passwords were:

1. 123456
2. 12345
3. 123456789
4. Password
5. iloveyou
6. princess
7. rockyou
8. 1234567
9. 12345678
10. abc123

"Everyone needs to understand what the combination of poor passwords means in today's world of automated cyber attacks: with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second-or 1000 accounts every 17 minutes," said Amichai Shulman, Imperva's chief technical officer.

"Employees using the same passwords on Facebook that they use in the workplace bring the possibility of compromising enterprise systems with insecure passwords, especially if they are using easy to crack passwords like '123456'," he added.
It is time before you should realize its importance. With the growth of social services and applications getting you busy, we should mange it with utmost care.

Ref: http://in.news.yahoo.com/139/20100121/854/ttc-the-ten-most-commonly-used-internet.html

Here are top 10 ways to best use your password.

1. Create a password with minimum six characters.
2. Use combination of characters and numbers
3. Don’t use generic passwords like password, mypassword or password123
4. Keep changing your passwords every week.
5. Don’t keep the same password for all your application
6. You can maintain a diary or a notepad to preserve your passwords
7. If possible always connect it to another account
8. For email accounts always use security question and its answer that only you are aware.
9. Never share your password with anyone.
10. Don’t store your password online.

Waiting for your comments and suggestions.

Read More

PeopleRank Your Online Reputation

Are you famous enough?

PeopleRank

PageRank (Google), TrustRank (Yahoo) and now PeopleRank (WebMii). PeopleRank or public information about you is no more a vanity. People don’t search for their own information on the web just for the sake of it anymore, the whole idea is to find out how much popular he/she is on the World Wide Web. The resultant factor is to get a brand name for you. WebMii conglomerates data from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Yahoo Search and other search engine to provide you with a picture of your image on the internet. However, there are some restrictions. They have country specific searches like USA, France, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland, United Kingdom and International as a category.

Public Profile Results Page (PPRS) as coined by me is something that have evolved over the time and I am sure people will be going crazy over this just like they did the same for twitter.

The PPRS have lots of sections namely Tags, Photos (powered by Facebook, Bing), Email, Facebook Profile, Hi5 Profile, Twitter, MySpace, Websites (powered by Yahoo) and Blogs (powered by Google) which contributes to the overall PeopleRank.

The time factor shown up in the right hand side can be assumed as being proud to conglomerate the data in such a short time.

Looks Good right!

Now, give a hawk eyes to the way the data is being manipulated. Let’s take an example. You have a low PeopleRank and now as you have come across this term you want to work on it. Here are few tips to improve it.

1. Increase you Facebook interaction
2. Name your images and upload as many variations as you want.
3. Tags even though powered by Google, I believe they involve Tagged info as well.
4. Make good use of your friends and connections at LinkedIn
5. If you have a blog it’s all the more advantageous to build your brand.
6. Make sure you have your name as the original name for most of these applications otherwise the whole effort is wasted.


Advantages :

• Most of the employers now seek online information pertaining to the candidate before even actually checking for references.
• The better information you have promoted for yourself the better it is for the yourself in terms of social gathering, online meetings.
• It may develop into a mania of checking your online reputation every now and then.
• Most of them are free applications, website thus the only thing you need to invest is time.
• Get famous – though with time.

Disadvantages:

• Be aware that your reputation is at stake when you expect bad comments for your profile.
• Most people are unaware of their public profile and even when they come to know about it … it might be too late.
• Online Reputation Management is a tough task, it involves a lot of time and logic.
• Make sure you don’t add your competitor in your circle, otherwise it may prove demeaning for your profile.

I am waiting for your comments now. Do comment on this post but please do not make comments merely for the sake of seo benefits by putting links through un relevant anchor texts.

Read More