Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on December 14, 2007 by CyberNet.

One of the most popular ways for securely encoding passwords is using MD5. Many online services use it as well as some applications because it is an efficient way to securely store a user’s password. For example, if your password was “admin” the MD5 hash would look like “21232f297a57a5a743894a 0e4a801fc3.”

There is no easy way to take an MD5 hash and have it reversed back to the original text. Hardcore crackers, however, often have databases that consume several gigabytes of pre-calculated MD5 hashes. By that I mean they’ll go through the dictionary and calculate the MD5 hash for all known words, and then move on to common password combinations. That way when they get their hands on a database filled with MD5 hashes they can begin searching to see if any of the users had used one of common words.

Pieter over in the forum posted a big eye opener for anyone that still uses common passwords. He pointed out this tool where a user is able to enter an MD5 hash in the text box. It will then scan what appears to be a rather extensive database to see if the MD5 hash corresponds to any of the known entries it has stored. Here are some of the results from the test Pieter did with it:

• 21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3 – CRACKED (admin)
• 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 – CRACKED (password)
• 33c5d4954da881814420f3ba39772644 – CRACKED (crackme)
• ec79d4bed810ed64267d169b0d37373e – CRACKED (8612)
• 61ebd641ffb9b13f2b3163677ef58b0a – CRACKED (2w9)
• 2eaa8683175fa19f2710707e793b1f04 – FAILED (2w9ss)
• 68dc6cbea6ddad512bc670c0df5c0804 – CRACKED (23984)
• 22604bba610abedf926b74646008896f – FAILED (613593)
• 031e174662676c05db4e019eaaa4de3d – FAILED (65151611)
• e425adc17b1e4feed1dc295b82d16cbd – FAILED (crackme123)
• 80e48c2df0e639b36cf2a2a75cbd8fdb – FAILED (imahacker)

As you can see, the more complicated a password is the more likely it won’t be in the database. Overtime the database will continue to grow, and the first thing that it will index is all passwords with lowercase letters and numbers. For that reason I urge everyone to re-evaluate the strength of their passwords. You should consider mixing upper and lower case, as well as using both numbers and symbols. It will take awhile to get used to a new password, but it’s worth the added security.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Though hard facts on the HTC Thunderbolt’s availability were hard to come by, conflicting rumors were flying fast and strong — now, a Best Buy ad seems to clear most everything up. Like we’d originally heard, the 4.3-inch LTE smartphone will launch for $250 on a two-year contract — or a wallet-crushing $750 without — but the key ingredients here are three words at the very top. The Thunderbolt is apparently a “national retail exclusive” for Best Buy, which explains how the device could simultaneously face Verizon delays and yet come in for a Valentine’s Day landing at the big box store. You’ll also note that the ad mentions Skype video and 4G mobile hotspot functionality, so we’d be surprised if the phone came without, though it’s also possible that the whole kit and kaboodle has been delayed to match — Droid-Life says this ad comes from a February 20th circular, so we might not see anything until then.

In case you needed an additional reason to be excited about the Thunderbolt, the developers at AndIRC have some related news — they’ve already rooted a prototype version (which just so happens to have the familiar codename Mecha) and believe the same technique will work on retail devices. Wouldn’t it be nice to have root on day one… whenever that is?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

HTC Thunderbolt exclusively hits Best Buy for $250 at launch, rooted prototype provides hope for easy unlock originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 12 Feb 2011 16:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink AliWaqas  |  Droid-Life, XDA-developers  | Email this | Comments

Now that Sony has started gathering the evidence it needs via discovery in the lawsuit over Hotz and friends’ PS3 jailbreak, the company has dropped a hammer by moving to reduce the amount of time the hackers have to get Sony the information it wants. Sony filed the motion — which will be heard by the court tomorrow — to better arm itself with information to oppose Geohot’s motion to dismiss, scheduled to be heard in early March. Casting its evidence-gathering net far and wide, SCEA has demanded that YouTube surrender not only information for Hotz’s account where his jailbreak video was posted, but also how many users accessed the video, the usernames of those with access to the video, and all usernames and IP addresses of everyone who posted or published comments to the vid. In addition to hitting up YouTube for dirt, Wired reports that Sony has demanded Twitter hand over the personal info of fail0verflow’s members — we’re waiting for Sony’s lawyers to don TSA gear as the next step in their search. Geohot’s attorney thinks the requests seem a bit much, but we think they make sense given Sony’s strategy of going after the entire fail0verflow team. While these goings-on make for fairly standard legal tactics, they won’t do much for Sony’s public image.

Sony v. Geohot litigation heats up, SCEA demands YouTube give up Hotz and Fail0verflow’s personal info originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Feb 2011 15:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  Wired  | Email this | Comments

Homebuilt UAV hunts down hydrogen balloons, shoots firework missiles (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 30 Jan 2011 14:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Geek.com  |  RCExplorer  | Email this | Comments

This article was written on February 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

There is so much information all over the web that keeping up with it all can become a tedious task. Most sites have feeds that can be subscribed to so that all of your news is aggregated into one location, but sometimes it is nice to actually visit your favorite sites.

If you’re like me then you probably have some a handful of sites that you actually like to view each day. In the morning when I wake up I typically visit a few sites like Slashdot, Google News (Technology), Yahoo! News, and of course our own Site/Forum. This gets the ball rolling for me and gets my news juices flowing.

There are actually several different ways that I use to keep up on my favorite sites. Three of the ways that I know of I’m going to mention here, and the last one is probably going to be the one that a majority of you don’t already know about.

The first way is with the GMarks Firefox extension. It allows me to create a group of bookmarks by assigning labels, and then lets me right-click on that group to open the sites in new tabs. This is really convenient, but is not something unique to this extension. Many other bookmarking extensions also have this feature, and even the built-in Firefox bookmark system will let you do this.

Another way that you can open multiple sites simultaneously in tabs is by setting your homepage to be more than one site. You can easily do this by specifying multiple sites in the Options like this:

http://www.searchmash.com/|http://cybernetnews.com

Notice the “|” that divides the two sites, which is what makes Firefox recognize that there are multiple sites tied to the homepage. Then every time you click on the homepage button it will pull up all of the sites that you have set as your homepage. You can also Ctrl+Click on the homepage button to open all of the sites in new tabs instead of overwriting your existing ones.

Okay, now for the last way that many of you were probably waiting for. You can actually create a desktop shortcut that will open a new window with all of your favorite sites. The easiest thing to do would be to copy your existing Firefox shortcut and just append a string similar to this onto the end of the “Target” field:

-new-window google.com|cybernetnews.com

which means the entire Target field would look something like this:

"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -new-window google.com|cybernetnews.com

This is a screenshot of what it should look like when editing the shortcut:

Then each time you click on that shortcut it will open a new window and each of the sites listed will be open in new tabs. I find myself using these shortcuts a little more than the other two methods mentioned above because I want the sites open in a new window. This keeps my current window a little more tidy and prevents unneeded clutter. Heck, I have a whole folder of Firefox shortcuts that I use depending on what kind of news I’m looking to read.

More command line arguments for Firefox can be found here.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

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