Our friend in the UK got this via a contact. It was from a Twitterer who obviously had his Twitter login stolen: (Twitter apparently is filtering this URL at this point.) The link led to a phishing page that used the deceptive tactic of showing an error message: “Wrong Username/Email and password combination.” You login, it steals your Twitter password, sends the above Tweet to all your contacts and continuing rounding up passwords. ...
The Inquirer security news site were reporting that the 25-year-old arrested by French police for hacking a Twitter data base and accessing U.S. President Barak Obama’s account guessed the admin’s password. The unemployed man, who went by the handle “Hacker Croll.” is not a genius, the news site concluded. “Apparently it was a doddle to do. He simply guessed people’s passwords by working them out from information on their blogs or online pages they had created about themselves,” it said. ...
It’s not possible to emphasise enough the importance of using sensible passwords on your network. Not just on the areas of your network that you don’t want your users to traipse through, but also on the default network shares that are present on installations of commonly used operating systems. The Windows versions Conficker targeted — NT, 2000, XP, and 2003 — are all end of life and no longer receive security updates. The lesson still applies to any machine with open shares today. ...
Treat your passwords with as much care as you treat the information that they protect. Use strong passwords to log on to your computer and to any site where you enter your credit card number, or any financial or personal information — including social networking sites. A password manager (Bitwarden, 1Password, KeePass, or similar) makes it practical to use a unique, strong password for every account. 1. Never provide your password over e-mail Internet “phishing” scams use fraudulent e-mail messages to entice you to reveal your user names and passwords, steal your identity, and more. Learn more about phishing scams. ...
Strong passwords are important protections to help you have safer online transactions. The best approach today is a password manager that generates and stores unique passwords for every site, combined with two-factor authentication (2FA) wherever it is offered. Keys to password strength: length and complexity An ideal password is long and has letters, punctuation, symbols, and numbers. Even better: use a passphrase — a sequence of random words that is easy to remember but hard to guess. ...