Professor Peck's Security Blog - Part 1

I can't remember if I told everyone - but I was recently hired by Davenport University to teach Information Security classes. I know I know you are all saying - but you are not a teacher. Correct! However, it turns out that at the college level you can teach classes if you have a Masters Degree in that field. Therefore, I can only teach Information Assurance classes.

My first class starts in January and it is called Information Warfare. Yes you did read that correctly.... I know a little bit daunting - but I am excited. So my plan is to start a security blog. I am going to make it on a different page than the regular blog one of these days, but for now.... here is my security blog.... part 1.

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I HATE the fact that Internet Explorer and Firefox ask you if you want to save your password... because by default everyone is going to say YES... the problem is you really don't know what you are saying yes to. The prompt should say - hey dummy do you want to save your password in a file that anyone can access and read? The problem is - it doesn't say that... it says hey I can help you out and make things easier for you if you just click this button which is selected by default and if you accidently click enter or ok then that works too.

Ok enough of the rant.... here are the straight facts.

Internet Explorer prompts you to save passwords when you go to a website that requires credentials. The problem is those passwords are easily discovered …. A better option is to use a program called KeePass (or similar) to keep your passwords safe. It has an auto complete option and it stores the passwords in an encrypted file that cannot be broken into without knowledge of the password you use to protect it. I have been using keepass for over a year now and it works great – give it a try I think you will like it….

If you are interested, you can read more about the IE & Firefox password issue here….

http://www.labnol.org/software/browsers/view-stored-password-firefox-internet-explorer/1906/

Oh – and 1 more tip – if you are really paranoid – make your password longer than 15 characters… this makes it extremely difficult to crack no matter what the complexity.