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Simfin

online safety and digital citizenship specialist

Adults who work with Young People News

12 August 2014

Researchers at Microsoft and Ottawa's Carleton University set out to to take a cold hard look at passwords and here's what they found: the way we traditionally measure password strength is inconsistent—and often say nothing about how hard it might be to guess a password.

Here's an example: some systems force you to chose an eight-character password, using capital letters, numbers and at least one number. That sounds pretty secure, but it's not. The word P@ssw0rd fits these criteria and password cracking tools such as JohntheRipper or hashcat will guess it in minutes. That's because they use something called "mangling rules" which take dictionary words and substitute letters such as a for @ or s for $.

Read the article 

06 August 2014

 All 500,000 victims of Cryptolocker can now recover files encrypted by the malware without paying a ransom.

The malicious program encrypted files on Windows computers and demanded a substantial fee before handing over the key to the scrambled files.

Thanks to security experts, an online portal has been created where victims can get the key for free.

 

Read the BBC article here

04 August 2014

'Google has revealed the identity of a user after discovering child abuse imagery in the man's Gmail account ...

It alerted a child protection agency, which notified the police and the man was arrested,..

The arrest raises questions over the privacy of personal email and Google's role in policing the web...

Google also refused to say whether it searched its users' Gmail content for other illegal activity, such as pirated content or hate speech.''

Read the article here.

31 July 2014

 A schoolgirl has received a police caution after texting an explicit photograph of herself to her boyfriend, it has emerged.

The teenager sent the image via her phone, but after the couple had a row, he forwarded it to his friends.

Police were called in because she was under the age of 18 and therefore both were committing an offence of distributing an indecent image of a child.

 

Read the article here.

30 July 2014

Most Australian youngsters believe their parents are oblivious to their web activities, while some admit to making fake social media profiles and fudging browser histories to deceive tech-savvy ones, a new report shows.

Seventy per cent of children aged between 8 and 17 said their parents did not know about all their internet activities, a survey involving 1000 tweens and teens by cyber security firm McAfee shows.

Read the article here.