Daily Archives: September 17, 2014
From Russia . . . with Love?
Someone in Russia, and the Netherlands too, doesn’t like me.
Or at least they’re trying to hack into my blog.
Twice this week or so, someone from the Russian Federation, Volgodansk in particular, has tried to log in to my blog, i.e. take it over. And last week, someone in the Netherlands tried to do the same thing.
Why, I don’t know. But this has been going on for a while. In fact, since I moved to this new blog theme a few months ago, there have been 2317 lockouts.
A lockout comes about after 4 failed login attempts. At this point, that person’s IP address was blocked from trying to login again for 20 minutes. After they were locked out 4 times like this, they were then locked out for 24 hours. At least that’s how it was until a couple of days ago.
Now they get two failed attempts, and then they’re locked out for 60 minutes, not 20. And then after they do this twice, they’re now locked out for 48 hours, not 24.
The culprits are probably using bots or scripts to throw words and numbers at the blog. In fact there are specially-written programs, coupled with dictionaries, just for this purpose. But they will almost certainly not guess mine. Because it’s not a word or words. It’s garbage.
It looks something like this.
oIh$P+T1f $.s-W (not the real password of course)
You can use a website like Strong Password Generator to create this type of password for you. Or you can just make it up. And No, you don’t have to remember this. You use a password manager, like Roboform, or LastPass.
A password manager works like this. When you go to any website that requires you to login, and you enter your name and password, the password manager pops up and asks if you want to save this password. When you click YES, the next time you come back to this site, the password manager pops up and asks if you want to login. When you click YES, it enters the name and password for you. Neat!
And the other neat thing is that when you first go to a new site and it wants you to give it a password to set up your account or login, the password manager will create one of these strong garbage passwords for you.
And then you never have to worry about it again.
Roboform costs about $30. LastPass is free. But at least get one of them.
Finishing up, whatever you do, don’t use the same password, or same few passwords for all your logins. (and some of you out there know who you are.) This is just inviting trouble.
Remember the news a couple of weeks ago about 5 million Gmail accounts and passwords were stolen. Now think if your bank account login uses the same one. And don’t think that because you’re just little old you, you’re not a target. How would they know about you?
They don’t, but they have millions of bots out there, trying to hack into millions of accounts at the same time. And they just sit back and wait for the results to roll in. And they only thing they had to do was click the Start button.
It’s all a game of numbers, just like Spam email, for example. They can sent out tens of millions of spam emails with the click of a button, at little or no cost. So if they get a few thousand sales, or even a few hundred, they’ve made money. That’s why they keep doing it.
So pay attention, and let’s be safe out there.
Oh, as far as here today, it’s rained all evening, and a guy saw a rattlesnake about a hundred feet up the road.
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Thought for the Day:
Heaven is where:
the police are British,
the lovers French,
the mechanics German,
the chefs Italian,
and it is all organized by the Swiss.
Hell is where:
the police are German,
the lovers Swiss,
the mechanics French,
the chefs British,
and it is all organized by the Italians.
afadsfsdf
