geek: November 2007 Archives

There has been a couple of memes circulating in Facebook recently. They consist of a warning that a certain Facebook user is actually a hacker and should they gain access to you - or your friends' Facebook profile they will hack it and your email account. Of course, these are almost certainly vindictive japes against specific individuals who aren't but are claimed to be hackers: just kids making it up for kicks.

See, these "hackers" can only access your accounts by using a username and password - like you do - to get in. So providing they don't know both they can't get in. Assuming any of these warnings of hackers trying to befriend you is true, they can find out your username (your email address for many accounts) and then start guessing your password, normally by trying commonly used passwords then dictionary attacks then sheer brute force attacks. There are other techniques that aid our hacker friend, but I'll leave that for now.

What you need to do to protect your email / Facebook / whatever accounts is:

1. Use different passwords for each account. If you use one for everything and someone finds that password they can access all your accounts.
2. Use strong passwords. These are typically a mixture of letters and numbers (and no, "password1" doesn't count) and not based on words.
3. Use KeePass (freeware) to keep your passwords safe and secure and prevent you from losing them.
4. Set yourself up a "public" free email account (gmail, hotmail, yahoo) that you use for very public use such as in your Facebook profile while keeping your normal email address for friends, business and family.
5. If you can't be bothered to use KeePass and strong passwords (maybe you use a fair few computers to access your accounts) then at least try making your passwords stronger by doing something like this:
1. pick a prefix - let's say "b1ue"
2. pick a suffix - "90" for example
3. now make your passwords start with the prefix and end with the suffix, and put something in the middle (probably something related to the account you are using it for) so "b1uemail90" "b1ueface90" and so on. This is not a strong password system, but it's better than "password", "letmein", "123456789" and so on.

Get into the habit of using strong passwords. You wouldn't use a simple bolt on your front door; you go for the Yale key, don't you?

We've all seen web sites that try dismally to protect their content by disabling the right-click driven context menu appearing. However, you might have a use for using the right-click as a prompt to do something useful. If you do, here's a quick solution: