Don't be Santa

Secure Your Passwords

Tips to Secure Your Password

DO’s

  ü  Use a mixture of upper and lower-case letters, numbers and symbols.

ü  Password length should be of at least eight Characters.

ü  Never share your password with anyone else.

ü  Change default passwords the first time you log in.

ü Use different passwords for your different accounts.

Don’ts

ü  Not include your user name or login name.

ü  Avoid including personal information that someone could know or find out about you, such as names of family, places, pets, birthdays, address, hobbies, information about your car, etc.

ü  Password should not be a word taken from dictionary, spelled forward or backward, or a word preceded or followed by a digit (e.g., password1, 1password).

ü  Avoid common keyboard sequences, such as "qwerty89" or "abc123"

ü  Don’t let your applications or browser remember passwords that provide access to sensitive systems or data. That way if someone gets into your computer they don’t also automatically get into all of your accounts.

ü  Avoid to pen down your password. Only use your mind as scribble book.

Are you a part of Botnet??

Imagine your personal computer becomes your worst enemy, watching everything you do, collecting all of your secrets, and then delivering all that data to the master computer.
A botnet is a network of compromised computers, each of which is known as a 'bot'(short name of robot), connected to the Internet and collecting as well as sending data to a botmaster often called as herder.

When this occurs, your computer can perform automated tasks over the Internet without your knowledge.
'Bots' are good at hiding in the shadows of your computer so that they are not noticed. If you could easily detect that something was running on your computer, you would quickly remove or disable it. They often have file and process names that are similar, or even identical, to normal system file names and processes so that users won't think twice even if they do see them.
But what does it really mean to be part of a botnet, and is there anything that can you do about it?

How can you tell if your machine is part of a botnet?

Statistically, a Windows based machine is most prone to such attacks although other Operating systems are not completely immune to all threats.

è Your computer is unusually slow, crashes or frequently stops responding to commands.

è Your network or internet connection is unusually slow.

è You system generating high network traffic even when you are not doing anything significant.

è Check Hosts file for any unwanted entry other than 127.0.0.1 (Do not delete anything before taking a backup copy).

è Use of commands like arp –a and netstat –a can help you in finding any IP address that is out of place.

è Using Windows Task Manager, if a top 10 memory consumer is a process that you don’t recognize, it could be a bot.

Protecting Your Computer from 'Bots'

As with so many other security risks, prevention is the best medicine.

ü  Run antivirus and antispyware software on your computer regularly.

ü  Keep your Operating system and application patched against the known vulnerabilities.

ü  Keep your system firewall program turned on.

ü  Don’t download and use unknown software’s (specially free).

ü  Do not be tricked into downloading malware.

ü  Don’t open any attachments in e-mail from senders you don't recognize.