Create Smart Spam

Ah spam, isn’t it wonderful?  Akismet is doing a pretty good job protecting me, but it blocked out a lot of you guys.  After check for legit comments that were blocked through Askimet I found out how popular I really was (heh).  Mostly though, there was just some really annoying shit.  You would think that by now companies would make intelligent spam bots, but no.  Using some natural language processing think of all the great things marketeradvertiserspammerannoying people could do.  I mean seriously spend a little time and develop a good application.  All you have to do is search for keywords, make an intelligent remark, and link to a site that redirects to your spam site (things look in URLs too).  You could use a service such as TinyURL (yes I know it is against the “Terms of Service”) to spam, or you could create your own redirection service with no limits on spam.  Seriously, write something intelligent or do not do it at all.  At least I can get a good laugh out of it!

~Ivan

Shrink Your File Format

Want to shrink the file format in your program?  Here’s a method for shrinking your numbers down.  If you write the number “127″ to a file, you are writing three bytes to the file (the ASCII character for each number).  This might not seem like a big deal, but in the long haul you can save a ton of space using the following method.  Write the character for 127 (\x7f, but printed as ).  Now read the file’s charachter and convert it into a number.  You just saved two bytes.  For writing numbers bigger than 256 (ASCII limit), write partials of numbers.  Break these numbers up in parts of two (589406830=58|94|06|83|0).  It might not be the most efficient way to shrink these numbers down, but it is easy to code and could save space in the long run.  If you want to shrink your numbers even more, convert them to hexadecimal before writing them to a file (hex was originally designed to write huge numbers).  Read these suckers back, feed it all into one string, and convert the string to an integer.  Congratulations on shrinking your file format.

Passwords and How They are Stolen

I posted a comment on  Angry 365 Days a Year about passwords.  The entry was entitled Passwords suck.  Most people don’t know a lot about passwords and password stealing.  My comment on the post was on how the passwords can be stolen:

Here are some of the ways people get passwords:
1) The downloading of keyloggers.
2) Hackers (if they have a known target) can port scan (check the open ports on a computer), find ports with vulnerabilities, and transfer data (such as a keylogger or R[emote]A[ccess]T[rojan]) through to the computer.
3) Hackers connect to a server of an email service, messenger service, etc., and run a brute force/dictionary attack. This is done by writing a program to continually try and rearrange letter combinations (brute force), or test all the words in the dictionary.

I forgot to mention shoulder surfing. Shoulder surfing might be the most common of all. People looking over your shoulder while you type your password is a serious security risk.  Another method is social engineering, which is someone tricking you into giving away your password (usually by pretending to be tech support).  A very similar way of getting passwords is phishing, by asking for passwords or personal information in email (or connecting you to a false site that will look authentic). Here’’s a little guide to making strong passwords:

 1)  Do not use words, known phrases, names, numbers, or personal information as passwords.
2) Use random letters and numbers in your password.
3) Use a mixture of uppercase and lowercase letters in your password.
4) If possible use special symbols such as $%.! in your password.
5) If you write your password down, do not put it out in the open. Shred the paper if you throw the password away.
6) Never trust anyone who wants your password.
7) Never put your password in plaintext on your computer (unencrypted text).

Here are some examples of weak passwords (in red) and strong passwords (in blue):

jimmy
girlfriend
11684
472385
mydoggie
1337

fo25vPEvMg42
dUI1OhanLINd5Ay
tym81MPty64
qmJ50cX85

Hopefully you can apply these tips to your passwords.

Cheers,

Ivan