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 Post subject: eBay Identity Theft Warning
PostPosted: Sat May 27, 2006 10:51 am 
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Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 12:22 pm
Posts: 21602
Location: San Francisco
A couple weeks ago my eBay account was hacked and all my personal information was stolen. The creeps try to use my cancelled credit card info daily.
The password that I was using was very easy to crack as it was a simple word, found in the dictionary.
:idea: If you have an eBay account, change your password to something that the "free downloadable password cracking software" that is available online, can not crack.

A combination of letters, numbers and symbols is your best bet.
Like:
75&$lk^#bob*37


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PostPosted: Sat May 27, 2006 11:31 am 
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Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Thank god you realized quickly what had happened.


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PostPosted: Sat May 27, 2006 4:38 pm 
That last line about letters numbers and symbols is really really good advice.
If you use words to help you remember your passwords do something to garble them so they arent words that appear on hacking software dictionary lists. The longer and more complicated the safer albeit more of a headache to login.

I search "Leitz Microscope" with software automatically ,several times daily. Everyweekend I see, and report to ebay immediately the same #%&*#!!! hijacker offering a too good to be true outfit. ( a Leitz Aristoplan big outfit, a picture he stole from a previous auction. You can guess from the word "AristoPlan" that it was like one of their total top of the line scopes) He always has a different handle which he has hacked or stolen from some innocent ebayer, always someone with excellent feedback, and all over the US. He seems to be in Britain Fortunately they zap him pretty quick. I bet I have reported him 40 times.
I hate to think what he would do if he found out who I am. Other microscope nuts whom I know from ebay have bid on his auctions and he of course wants fast, irrevocable payment before he will "ship". And his auction always says "Don't contact me though ebay I wont answer" and "You must contact me and get permission to bid or I will cancel your bid"

They cancel his auctions but I don't quite know why he is still walking free. Fleabay is big enought that they should have a security department that has good liason with all police departments. I fault them for being deficient in that respect.

Gene


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 Post subject: passwords
PostPosted: Tue Jun 06, 2006 7:18 pm 
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Joined: Wed Apr 26, 2006 12:44 am
Posts: 2056
Location: San Francisco
I spent 5 years in the internet boom designing crypto systems. The strength of a password is defined as it's "entropy" which is the degree of randomness it displays. With just alpha numeric characters in your password, it doesn't take long to go through the length of chars in your password * 26 (or 52 if you use upper case) to crack them. Like 2 seconds on a modern desktop computer. Once you add special symbols like #,@ & etc.. it goes up exponetially. Add numbers and you've made the problem pretty uncrackable. a password like sunshine#24* takes about 4 years to crack w/ home pc's using brute force. Add two more special chars and it moves it out to 50 years..

So add the specials and numbers and your very solid.. (except for the NSA :) )


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