In the past we've talked about how to scan your signature to help go paperless. In this post, we are going to look at the fundamentals behind sending truly encrypted emails and documents that can be verified with a digital signature. The idea is to show you the concepts so you understand what is going on behind the scenes to make a secure communication channel over email. So why spend the time on this? As we switch to doing more business over the internet, secure communications are going to become much more important. Even if you don't have a use for encryption right now, you probably will over the next 3 to 5 years (if not before). There is a lot of value in understanding why email … [Read more...] about Digital Signature & Encryption
security
Passwords – Different For Each Account
The founder of Facebook has been accused of using information from Facebook to break into email accounts at Harvard Crimson (Harvard's newspaper). While I don't know if it is true or not, the technique is plausible and is an excellent demonstration of why you shouldn't use the same password for every website and how important it is to create secure passwords. The story says that the Facebook founder was concerned about a story the Crimson planned on running. He located people on Facebook who said they worked at the Crimson. Since it sounds like Facebook stores passwords in a secure manner, he couldn't simply look them up from the database. Instead, he went through the server's logs to try … [Read more...] about Passwords – Different For Each Account
Using Different Passwords
Recently some hackers got a hold of a list of usernames and passwords for a dating site. By itself, this wouldn't have been too big of deal. However, many of the victims were using the same password on other sites. This gave the hackers access to many Facebook, MySpace, AIM and GMail accounts. The hackers then did everything they could to embarrass the victims by posting things online. This ranged from making a minister look like he was having an affair to creating a panic that someone was going to commit suicide. I've previously talked about how it is a good idea to use different passwords, if not for every site, at least for every type of site. (You don't want to use the … [Read more...] about Using Different Passwords
10 Tips for Creating Secure Passwords
If you do anything with computers, you deal with passwords and you probably have a handful of different passwords for different sites and systems. The best password is something that you will never forget, but even your family or closest friend would never guess. In my experience people either have extremely secure passwords like J!*xurQ1# that are so difficult to remember that they have to write them down (which defeats the security of a password) or extremely unsecure to start with, like Jonny (the name of their spouse). The goal of this post is to give you some ideas on how to generate secure passwords. The tips start out with some simple ways to come up with terms and end with … [Read more...] about 10 Tips for Creating Secure Passwords
Keeping Your Stuff Safe
The other day, I stepped outside and found my neighbor lugging a broken door out of his garage and into the back of his pickup truck. It turns out he had locked himself out of his house. His wife was away and he had no spare keys. To make matters worse, their new puppy was inside the house. He simply kicked the door in, got his keys and then went and purchased an identical door, which I helped him install. Later on that day, I was talking with some other neighbors who are both police officers. They were staring at the mangled door next to the curb and wondering what happened. They commented that the doors and locks on our houses don't really keep our possessions safe. For the … [Read more...] about Keeping Your Stuff Safe
Password Chart
Password Chart is an interesting method to generate secure passwords. You give it a "master" password which is used to generate a chart that maps single letters to one or more letters. You then just type in the name of the service you need a password for, and it will turn that into a password. Be sure to checkout our 10 Tips for Creating Secure Passwords. … [Read more...] about Password Chart
Password Creation Technique
I ran across a nice post on creating unique passwords today. Also see our previous post on the subject. … [Read more...] about Password Creation Technique