Comment: vulnerabilty (Score 1) 1
May be from now they start storing the passwords in plain text.
+ - How Charles Dickens helped crack your LinkedIn password->
Submitted
by
angry tapir
angry tapir writes "Security expert Kevin Young and his colleagues are working to decode some 2.6 million scrambled LinkedIn passwords, part of a total of 6.1 million released earlier this week on a Russian password cracking forum. Young studies how people pick passwords and how resistant they are to cracking. Converting the hashes into their original passwords is possible using decoding tools and powerful graphics processors. But the longer and more complicated the password — using sprinklings of capital letters, numbers and symbols — the longer and harder it is to crack. What's interesting about the LinkedIn hashes is the trouble experts are having at converting the hashes to their original password. Of the 6.1 million hashes, some 3.5 million appeared to have already been cracked since those hashes have "00000" at the beginning. In order to crack them, Young and his team need more words and more word combinations for so-called brute-force attempts. They've turned to some of the world's most famous books.Young has written a program that draws passphrase strings from books such as Tale of Two Cities, War and Peace, The Call of the Wild and The Land of Oz. The program takes words from those books and creates phrases and concatenations such as "lionsandtigersandbears" and "ihavebeenchangedforgood." Both generated hits in the LinkedIn hashes."
Link to Original Source
Link to Original Source
Alien Screenwriter Dan O'Bannon, Dead At 63 139
Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
from the fare-thee-well-nostromo dept.
from the fare-thee-well-nostromo dept.
Dave Knott writes "The notable science fiction screenwriter and director Dan O'Bannon has died at the age of 63. O'Bannon's career began with a writing credit for John Carpenter's Dark Star and he went on the write many enduring science fiction and horror films such as Blue Thunder, Lifeforce, Screamers and Total Recall. He was also an occasional director, whose credits include The Return Of The Living Dead, the campy horror film that made popular the zombie chant of 'braaiiiinnnsss.' However, he will be best remembered as the writer of Alien, one of the all-time classics of both the science fiction and horror genres. O'Bannon died after a 30 year battle with Crohn's disease and is survived by his wife, Diane, and son, Adam."
Apple Counter-Sues Nokia Over Patents 137
Posted
by
ScuttleMonkey
from the fight-fire-with-more-lawyers dept.
from the fight-fire-with-more-lawyers dept.
adeelarshad82 writes "About two months ago Nokia sued Apple for infringing Nokia patents in its iPhone. The 10 patents in the lawsuit, filed in the US state of Delaware, relate to technologies fundamental for devices using GSM, UMTS and/or local area network (LAN) standards. The patents cover wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption and are infringed by all Apple iPhone models shipped since the iPhone was introduced in 2007. In the latest development to the case, Apple said Friday that it had filed its own suit against Nokia, countering Nokia's claims of patent infringement with its own."