A fact of life in the twenty-first century are data breaches - some site or other gets pwned and tends to hundreds of gigabytes of data get stolen. If you're lucky just the usernames and passwords for the service have been taken; if you're not, credit card and banking information has been exfiltrated. Good times.
You've probably wondered why stolen passwords are dangerous. There are a few reasons for this: The first is that people tend to re-use passwords on multiple sites or services. Coupled with the fact that many online services use e-mail addresses as usernames, this means that all …
Hopepothesis - noun - What you come up with when you really don't know what you're doing or what's going on, but you pull something out of your ass anyway. If anybody asks, that's your working hypothesis.
One of the most annoying things about the modern world is that pretty much everything you're likely to use these days, from your network login at work to your webmail account to your bank's website requires a username and password before you can actually do anything. Way back when this functionally didn't used to be such a big deal - people chose easy to guess passwords for their accounts and left it at that. Later on, admins discovered that crackers probably wouldn't spend hours on end guessing passwords, they'd spend a few hours writing software to do it for them (which …
Earlier this year, pen-testers hired by the Internal Revenue Service attempted a time-worn attack as part of their assignment: They phoned up 102 people who work at an IRS office while pretending to be tech support and asked them for their usernames. The people called were also asked if they could temporarily change their passwords to something simple (love? sex? secret? god?) as part of a troubleshooting effort.