CYBER SECURITY & CRACKING PASSWORDS

 CYBER SECURITY

We often subscribe to various sites in order to receive exciting offers. Sometimes our email-id comes in the hands of spammers/attackers and here is where you can be in trouble. Since we know, nowadays our email-id is linked to many of our accounts, be it Bank Account, Social Media Accounts or anything else, it’s important to keep it away from attackers. 

For those who do not know how phishing works: 

Let me put out a scenario in front of you.

       

1.  Say you have an account in XYZ bank.
2. The spammer comes to know about it.
3.  They create an email-id with the name of the bank which looks genuine. 
4.  They use the logo of the XYZ bank and keep it as real as possible.
5.  They send you an email explaining how there is an issue in your bank account and they attach a link, which has to be clicked in order to address the issue. 
6.  Now, you click on the link and you are taken to a site, which appears to be a site of the bank but is developed by the attacker. 
7.  You unknowingly enter the details and all your details, username, passwords are then collected by the scammer
8.  You just became a victim of phishing. 

In a technical Term “Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information or data, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by disguising oneself as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.” 

How you can Avoid it: 

•  Don’t just keep giving your email and personal details to anyone on the internet or anywhere.
• If you receive an email from your bank or social media do not blindly trust it. Do your research.
• Do not click on the links from not so trust worthy sites.  

 Cracking Passwords:

This needs a lot of practice, however is not impossible. Be really careful while creating a password. Specially your email accounts, social accounts, Bank accounts etc. Make sure they are strong passwords. 

 Do not create passwords such as “12345” or “password” or your name and birth date. These passwords can be cracked quite easily. If you do not know, whenever you create a password, the company stores your password after a process called hashing, so even the company does not know what your password is.

 But there are certain common hashes that are available, and attackers do have them. They try to match the hashes for and can hack into accounts that have quite common passwords.  

A minimum 8 letter along with some numbers and symbols is a good practice and should be followed while creating one.