Th3 S3cr3t Ag3nt

Every year security companies are coming up with the “worst passwords” based on breached credentials found on in the murkier parts of the internet. Every year people seem surprised that “123456” is a terrible password and people are still using it. Passwords often get rated by how quickly the could be “cracked”. The length of time for cracking passwords in the real world varies wildly according the the context and the numbers are often confusing. NordPass recently published their list of most common passwords and claimed that the third most popular password was “picture1” and it would take 3 hours to crack. If that’s referring to offline password cracking then we should have a whip-round to upgrade the hackers hardware because a password like that should take seconds to crack. When hackers try to brute force their way into an account online they have to try lots of different password combinations until they get in, or just give up. This takes a lot of time so hackers spend time optimiz...

Improving your password game. Many companies around the world are settling into a future where most people work from home, at least for a while. Working from home comes with many benefits, but there are downsides from a security point of view. Most modern enterprises have spent significant chunks of their security budget on securing their perimeter. Sure everything is moving to the cloud and most of the workforce has been mobile for some time, but many IT departments still rely on people either physically coming into the office or using VPN. Without this patches cannot to be pushed to machines, updates cannot be applied, and perimeter IPS and IDS systems cannot pick up connections to C2 and malicious URLs that traditional AV missed. When it comes to security, most enterprises aren't set up for people to work outside the wire for sustained periods. What are the risks of working outside the wire? The chances are that when your employees are working from home, the only thing protectin...