Your passwords can be cracked easily if less then 16 Characters now!!!!

1.    When the IT security big bang of Do's and Don'ts started some years back it was widely advertised to the Cyber masses to keep their respective passwords any thing more then 8 characters with a mix and match of capitals and smalls with special characters...then this was increased to 10 and last heard it was 15...and was told that 15 character password which is not dictionary based will take years and is actually uncrackable...

2.  As recent as 4 days back,a team of 3(your read it rite it's three) hackers has been able to crack more than 14,800 supposedly random passwords from a list of 16,449 by simply brute forcing!!!!

Image courtesy : http://www.buzzquake.com/tag/brute-force-attacks/

3.   In December it was unveiled by Jeremi Gosney, the founder and CEO of Stricture Consulting Group, that a 25-computer cluster can cracks passwords by making 350 billion guesses per second. It can try every possible word in less than six hours to get plain text passwords from lists of hashed passwords...the word of significance is that you do not need high end machines and east-west architecture to build this kind of IT infra...it is simply a cluster of machines processing power...

4.   The general user in the cyber space like you and me have actually no control over which hashing process websites use and therefore remain at the mercy of an algorithm all would invariably be clueless about...so if you are concerned about security and your email id and password which is the key for so many transactions in your routine life.long passwords are the best defense....and not simply long it has to be a mix match of numerics,capitals,smalls and special characters!!!.

5.  All the best to all of us...keep surfing but avoid drowning!!!! :-)Thanks http://thehackernews.com

The power of ALGORITHMS : Writing Articles/Reports/News!!!

1.  We all are pretty aware that whatever works on the net ,cyberspace web,applications is all backed by many codes and algos running in the background..,,it is these algorithms and codes that actually decide how things happen at the front end ie the user interface.Designed by coders and programmers these algorithms perform herculean tasks in all our routine IT activities...now for all those of us who work in offices and corporate ....we generally keep coming across compiling and analysing reports on various aspects ,be it the views...the summary...the monthly/quarterly feedback... the main article for some journal....or some regular feed etc.So now making these reports and feedbacks etc actually requires manual intervention...and the quality of these reports are proportional to the amount of quality work man hours that have gone into making it....but what if these manual intervention is replaced by intelligent algorithms...ie the reports being compiled are made out of algorithms???

2.   This is what has happened at Narrative Science,a company that trains computers to write news stories...yes you heard it write!!! "Trains computers to write News Stories".The first story that I read about this is available here.The brief points from this story goes like these :

     -  Every 30 seconds or so, the algorithmic bull pen of Narrative Science, a 30-person company occupying a large room on the fringes of the Chicago Loop, extrudes a story whose very byline is a question of philosophical inquiry.

  - Kristian Hammond is the CTO and co-founder of Narrative Science.According to Hammond, these stories are only the first step toward what will eventually become a news universe dominated by computer-generated stories....(amazing amazing future!!!!:-)

   - If one wishes to know the percentage of news that would be written by computers in 15 years.......according to Hammond is going to be more then 90%

3.   So guys the above example is for the news world...where else we can think? Can it compile Intelligence reports for the FBI and our CID based on inputs from so many sources....Off course this is being handled manually as on date....but imagining a intel report compiled by a algorithm is a serious contender for making a permanent place in such agencies.Well...this is one imagination...how about demographic repots...election reports...infact the list is endless.....

4.    Thanks http://www.wired.com