Category: Information at Reverse Delta

Figures from a survey by ZoneAlarm show that the 20 most common passwords we choose when set up accounts, with the most common being 123456 and 5 of the 20 being first names! The survey also showed up the the majority of people pick a 6 digit password and only a third of uses pick a password over 8 characters! For more information and all the statistics from this survey, see this graphic on the following link : better and more secure passwords.

Today, the FBI will shut down a number of Internet servers which may cause  300,000 people to lose their ability to connect to the internet. The servers in question are DNS servers which act like an address book for the internet, telling computers where to find the sites that users are looking for. These servers where being controlled by a criminal gang and misdirecting internet connections, netting the cyber-criminals money for doing so. This was achieved using "malware"(malicious programmes) downloaded by unsuspecting users, changing the internet settings to use the rogue DNS servers, rather than normal DNS servers. The rogue servers were seized by the FBI and altered to run 'correctly' so that people could have time to repair the damage to their PCs before the servers were dis-connected, as this malware is still on peoples machines, and still trying to use the Rogue servers.  The date for this disconnection is today. More details on the story and links for a tool to check if you are infected is here.