Password Protection for Windows Password

With Following steps your windows password would not be cracked with any password cracking tools which are mostly used to crack windows passwords.

So let's start:

Step 1. Goto Start>Run.

Step 2. Type syskey.exe and then click Ok.

Step 3. A dialog box is open then Click on Update.

Step 4. Then enter your password.Then click OK.
Now its done......

Stay Safe

5 Threats To Your Home Wireless Connection

Keeping your wireless connection safe should be a top priority, especially if you use your wireless laptop or cell phone to login to secure financial accounts or business email. We all use the internet to access personal information, do banking, and chat in private to friends. Image if someone was watching you, browsing through your files, or recording your every move on your computer? Well don’t just sit there and think that it will not happen to you! If you have a wireless connection then you should make sure it is safe and secure by adding at least one simple security measure. Wireless network security is very important when it comes to protecting your privacy and precious data.

The Risks of a Weak Wireless Connection

Last year, the Washington Post report on a series of Facebook scams. Hackers would break into people’s Facebook accounts, claim to have been robbed in a foreign country, and ask their Facebook friends for someone to wire them money. Could this fool your family and friends into handing over hundreds or thousands of dollars?
One thing that makes this possible is that hackers can access your Facebook account, no matter how strong your password, if they can snoop on your wireless connection. They don’t need special equipment to do this—any basic wireless card lets hackers snoop on wireless connections using free software.

There are three ways to protect yourself from wireless connection hackers:

1. Don’t use a wireless connection. Always plug your computer into a blue Ethernet cord.
2. Only use a wireless connection at least 1/2 mile (about 1 kilometer) away from any hackers.
3. Secure your wireless connection from the five types of threats described in this article.

Wireless Connection Threat #1: Unencrypted Connections

Unencrypted connections are great—they’re easy to set up on your wireless router and all of your devices connect automatically. But because they’re unencrypted, hackers can eavesdrop on all of your wireless traffic. Well, almost all of your wireless traffic—anything that uses Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption like websites starting with HTTPS will be encrypted.
Unfortunately, although Facebook and GMail and other sites use SSL for login screens, they don’t use it for their regular connections. In these cases, hackers can still break into your accounts by reading the cookie your Web browser sends to Facebook and Google every time you connect.
If you own the wireless connection, your best solution is to enable encryption on your router. Choose WPA encryption if possible, but on older routers you’ll need to settle for WEP. See the next section for information on the risks of WEP.
If you don’t own the wireless connection, for example you’re at a library or coffee shop, then you need to protect your connection by using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or by using one of the plugins for your browser which force Facebook, GMail, and other services to use SSL.

Wireless Connection Threat #2: WEP

The Wired Equivilance Privacy (WEP) system was part of the original specification for wireless Internet, but within a few years of being released, hackers figured out how to break it. In 2007, three cryptoanalysts broke into a WEP connection using a 1.7 GHz laptop in less than 1 minute. They published their technique and now any hacker can use it to eavesdrop on any WEP-protected connection.
WEP has been officially replaced by Wifi Protected Access (WPA), but many old routers only support WEP. If you have an option to use WPA, please use it. If you don’t have support for WEP on your router and you’re concerned about security, you should see if the manufacturer of your router offers a firmware upgrade. Otherwise you should buy a newer router.

Wireless Connection Threat #3: Weak Passwords

WPA lets you secure your wireless connection using a password, but this password can be hacked like any other weak password. Because this password helps keep all of your other passwords secure, you should put some extra thought into making it very secure. Besides, you’ll only have to type it once on each computer, so it won’t be much of a hassle to make it extra hard to guess.
I suggest you add a few numbers and some punctuation to your password to help keep hackers from guessing it. Also make sure it’s at least 8 characters long—and preferably 12 characters or more.

Wireless Connection Threat #4: Snooping Users

No matter how secure you make your wireless network using WPA and strong passwords, you still must trust every user you let onto your network. Once users have access to your network, they can snoop on every packet sent on your wireless connection.
For example, if you’re at a hotel which uses WPA and you log into Facebook, any hacker who’s in a nearby room can also use his WPA-protected connection to snoop on your packets. At an office, employees can snoop on the boss’s WPA connection to get access to confidential information.
High-end routers can give each user their own secure connection, or you can just buy separate cheap routers for each class of user—for example, one router for managers and one router for employees.

Wireless Connection Threat #5: Traffic Analysis

One of the most advanced hacker techniques which is probably not used much in the real world is called traffic analysis. It lets hackers snoop on certain communication even when it’s encrypted.

For example, researchers from John Hopkins University in Maryland, US, were able to decode encrypted voice-over-IP (VoIP) phone calls by looking at the size of the encrypted packets. The sound “c” produced small packets, but the sound “ow” produced a big packet, so a small packet followed immediately by a large packet might mean someone said, “cow”.

Other researchers and possibly hackers can use traffic analysis to figure out all sorts of interesting things about your communication. There’s no easy solution to traffic analysis—you have to hope the people who make your software read the security journals. However, you can try to avoid sending highly-sensitive information on the same wireless communication network hackers use. 

Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 on USB Device

Procedure to record Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 to a removable USB device.,

Steps to Follow:1. Download the iso image of Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 and a special utility 
Download the following utilities:

• Iso image of Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 (196 MB) 
• Utility to record Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 to USB devices (378 KB)

2. Recording Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 to your USB device: 
In order to do this, perform the following actions:

• Connect the USB to  your system. The USB Device should have the following features: 
•  USB Device should not less than 256 MB.  
• USB device must have FAT16 or FAT32 file system. If it is formatted in NTFS file system then you need to format it in FAT16 or FAT32 first.
• Run the downloaded file rescue2usb.exe. On the Kaspersky USB Rescue Disk Maker window, click Browse... and select the iso image of Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10

•  Under 'USB Medium' Select the required USB device  and Click START. Wait until the process is complete.

• Click OK on the open window informing that Kaspersky USB Rescue Disk has been successfully created. 

3. Configure the computer to boot from Removable Device:- 

To do this, perform the following actions: 

• Enable booting from removable devices in BIOS settings  
• Connect the removable device with Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 image to your computer.

4. Boot your computer from Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10

• Restart your computer. After reboot, a message will appear on the screen: Press any key to enter the menu.  Press any key. 

• A loading wizard will start (you will see the menu to select the required language). If you do not press any key in 10 seconds, the computer boots from hard drive automatically. In the start up wizard window that opens, select the graphic interface language using the cursor moving keys. Press the ENTER key on the keyboard. 

• Select one of the following start up methods and Press the ENTER.
• Kaspersky Rescue Disk. Graphic Mode loads the graphic subsystem.
• Kaspersky Rescue Disk. Text Mode loads the text user interface represented by the Midnight Commander (MC) console file manager. 
• Boot from Hard Disk. 

• The End User License Agreement of Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 is displayed on the screen. Read carefully the agreement. If you agree with all the statements of the agreement press the C button on your keyboard.

Once the actions described above have been performed, the operating system starts. It scans your computer for connected devices and searches for file systems of your local and removable disks. Once the operating system has started, you can start work with Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10. If the host operating system is in sleep mode or its operation has been completed incorrectly, you will be asked to mount the file system or restart the computer. In order to boot from the hard drive to shut down the operating system correctly, select Restart computer.

• If you select Continue, the application will continue mounting the file system, but there is a fairly high risk of file system damage. 
• If you select Skip, the application will skip file system mounting. Only boot sectors and autorun elements will be scanned. There is a fairly high risk of file system damage.

Stop Virus entering from USB to Pc and Vice versa

In this post i am gonna tell to How to protect both PC and USB from Viruses. Well, Do you know On what moments viruses transfer from USB 2 PC and PC 2 USB????

1. At the time when we Open USB Drive for Copying a File from USB to PC
2. During Copying a File from PC to USB

So if we do something to stop entering Viruses on these two moments then you can protect both PC and USB from Viruses.

Now the Question arises How we can do this......

Answer:

1. At the time when we Open USB Drive for Copying a File from USB to PC

• On this time if we disable the Writing Property of USB drive then viruses can't enter in the USB.

Now Steps to disable the Writing Property of USB drive:

1.  Click Start, click Run, type Regedit in the Open box, and then click OK.

2.  Go to HKLM > System > current control set > control

3. Right click on Control folder> new> key and give name 'StorageDevicePolicies'

4. Now In the right side window right click > new > Dwrd value and give it a value '1'

5. Now close registry, restart PC. 

2. During Copying a File from PC to USB

• Always use 'send to' (right click on file that has to copy> send to > USB Drive) except copind and pasting file.
• During Copying a File from PC to USB Remember to enable the Writing Property of USB drive by changing value 0 in step 4.

Direct shortcut to Enable and disable the Writing Property of USB drive 

• EnableUSBWrite
• DisableUSBWrite

Note: Registry Modification will be in effect only after Reboot PC.

Be safe

Manual virus removal from 'System Volume information'

In Windows,  System Volume Information is a system folder, to keep track of the changes took placed on a partition in a fix time period. This folder exists in every partition on your HDD. By default this folder is hidden, but you can see it by showing the hidden and system files and folders.The information stored in these folders helps Windows to revert to an earlier state, when you use the System Restore tool.

But sometimes, some malware files get in the System Volume Information folder. This can happens by any of following reasons:

1.  the malware wants to get there so that user doesn't have access to delete it and from where it can restore itself, 
2. or some malware file gets deleted and Windows decides that the file was important and it automatically stores it there, in case you ever want it back.

Well, you can easily clean malware infection from this folder by using the following simple steps:

• Right click on My Computer, then go to Properties
• Now in Windows XP:  Go to System Restore tab, enable the option Disable System Restore on all drives and click Apply. This should erase all System Restore Points, including the infected file(s).
• In Windows 7: Go to System Protection > then under protection settings choose hard drive that have malware and click Configure > Turn off system Protection > ok
• After this, again enable the system Restore option and press Apply again, so that you'll re-enable System Restore.

Check If Your Antivirus is working Properly

Do you know you can check your antivirus manually in one step that is it working properly or not??? Or is ur antivirus is got infected by viruses???

If you have any doubt on ur antivirus then immediately check performance of your antivirus by EICAR.

What is EICAR???
This is a dummy file for testing and checking performance of any antivirus..... which is detected exactly as if it were a virus. This file is known as the EICAR Standard Anti-Virus Test file. 
Naturally, this file is not a virus and not harm ur system. Just it use to test ur AV. When executed, it will display the text "EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!" and exit. It is developed by the European Institute for Computer Antivirus Research, to test the response of computer antivirus.
 

How to create an EICAR file???

To create an EICAR test file, open notepad and paste the following line of code..... 

X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*

Now Save the file with any name using an exe extension; for example, FakeVirus.exe

After creating EICAR???
After creating EICAR file, if your antivirus  detect it as virus and delete it, then your antivirus is working prefectly.


The EICAR test file can be detected by several antivirus like Norton, bit defender, F-Secure, AVG, Antivir etc.  as a virus.
I have tested this on my lappi, and my antivirus(F-Secure) has proved its performance.... 
What about urs????

Stay Safe!!!

Check In How much time your Password can be Hacked

To keep secure our web accounts we always do talk about Putting Strong Passwords, But how you would know that your password is strong or not??

What are Strong Passwords

Normally we say strong password to those passwords which satisfy the following points:- 

• Contains Letters(upper and lower case both), Numbers and Symbols. 
• Also your password should not be a common Password. like 123456, password, iloveyou etc
• According to Microsoft an ideal strong password must contain at least 14 characters. But there are many words in dictionary also which contains no. of letters greater than 14. you should not keep those words as ur password.

But Question Arises:

What is the need of a strong password, How a weak password can be hacked easily??

Though there are many ways to hack passwords but hacking 'weak' passwords is  done usually by Brute Force Method. In hacking Terms this Method is calledDictionary Attack. In Dictionary Attack using Brute Force Algorithm, A software checks all the existing words of dictionary to find the correct password.

Check how much time your password will take to hack using Brute Force

On web i found a site, where it check the that how secure is  your password. It do some simple mathematical calculations to find out time to generate any particular password using brute force.

If you have a strong password, then the time will be probably in Years but for week password it will be only some seconds, hours or some days!!!

So check your password now :)

http://howsecureismypassword.net/

Beware of Hardware Keylogger

Hardware key-logger is a tiny device that plugs in between a keyboard and computer, and  is a very popular way of capturing and storing keystrokes from keyboard to their internal memory. Hardware keylogger are coming with 512 KB upto 2 GB memory. A 512 KB keylogger can store more than 512000 captured key strokes. It can capture data for 3 month with 8 hours working on computer daily. Can you imagine that how many secret information can be stored if the memory is 2GB. 

Advantage of hardware keylogger over Software keylogger:

• Hardware keyloggers are not OS dependents, hence can work on any OS.
• It does not interfere with any program running on the target machine and hence cannot be detected by any software, but software keyloggers are mostly detectable by good anti-viruses.  
• Software keyloggers can be fooled by sending encrypted or fake keystrokes, but in case of hardware keylogger as it is directly inline with keyboard, so cant send fake keystrokes.http://www.techbyte4u.com/
• Hardware can begin capturing from the moment a computer is turned on and are therefore able to intercept BIOS passwords.

Hardware keylogger can be of two types according to its connection type with Keyboard:-

1. PS2

2. USB

Detecting and Defeating Hardware keyloggers:-

 But hardware keyloggers cant always detect like this, they can be inbuilt in keyboard, they can be wireless, or they can be hided through any other way so that you cant see them. So you need to be alert while using a public computer. 

How to remove Autorun.inf Virus

There is a very simple process to remove autorun.inf virus file. Follow the method below...

1. open up a command prompt (i.e. cmd.exe) ; to load it go to Run, type cmd, enter.

2. Now see the Four code lines highlighted below... you have to use them all one by one.

e.g. for f: drive...

F: \

F: \attrib

F: \attrib -s -h -r autorun.inf

F: \del autorun.inf

• First for entering into any drive
• Second, for checking virus's attributes.After pressing enter, you will see all files of that drive. Check for autorun.inf  file in them. 

You should see something like:

    SHR    Autotun.inf        C:\Autorun.inf

• third, for changing file's  to attributes.  Usually this virus has attributes SHR(checked by second line) where S stands for system, H for hide,  R for read-only. So To clear an attribute we use  -  (the minus sign) with attrib. 
• fourth, for deleting virus file.

3. Repeat Second step for all drives of ur system.

Protect yourself from getting hacked!!!!!!

Before writing more about hacking, i was thinking to let the innocent people know about hacking and how hackers perform their hacking operation to get your accounts. So that you can protect yourself from getting hacked!!!!!!

I am giving here Tips that ' what you should not to do' with explanation that ' why not to do'.

Tip 1. Use Strong Passwords: 

• Always use passwords that hard to guess (Mix of digits + letters in Upper case and lower case both) for your all accounts. the longer your password, the better.
•  Never use any common word, your name, spouse, parents, birthdate etc.

Explanation 1: 

• Week Passwords and be easily  hacked using a Brute Force method which do combination of numbers and letters until the real password comes.
• Common passwords containing name, birthdate can be easily guessed by your friends, any known to you.

Tip 2. Carefully Click on Links: 

• Always Check the links carefully before clicking on that.

Explanation 2:

•  To explain the this tip,I am taking to examples. Read the examples carefully. 
• Ex. 1: Please verify your Account....login here "http://okrut.com" 
• Ex. 2:" we are upgrading our system. please verify your name, mail id, password etc. etc. before date blah blah...  here "http://yahoo.com/"  
• Ex. 3: check this image... this screen shot i hv taken from a forum in Orkut.

Did you get what is Wrong here in these 2 Examples.hmmmm??? Ok let me explain you.

• In Ex. 1: check the spelling of Orkut carefully in that link. It can take you on a Fake Orkut Login page. that is called Phishing attack. As soon as you login through that fake login page the hacker get the login name, password or complete information of your account. 
• In Ex. 2: is there anything wrong???? All the spellings are correct... dear ones, just click on the link, you will understand whats wrong. Don't afraid to click... you r safe... Its just a tutorial to let you learn the things. So click the link......
• hmmm.... Got my Point in ex. 2, Its showing you the link of yahoo. but as you click on it, It redirect you to this site. So Always check the link carefully. I recommend you to use "link preview addon" for your browser. 

• In Ex. 3: check the link carefully..... in last the extension is html... but just before html its written exe..... html is written here just to make you fool. so that you click on link. but as soon as you will click, an executable file will be installed into ur system. 

Tip 3: Never Open Email Attachments without scanning:

• Don't open any email attachment from any unknown person. And if the person is known then also first scan the email attachment before open or download it.

Explanation 3:

• Email Attachments can contain Executable Virus files, that can harm your system. These files usually comes with extension .vbs, .bat, .exe.
• image files with extension .Jpeg or .gif can also contain virus. Beware, Virus can be integrated with those jpeg files that are also auto executable. As soon as you open the virus infected picture, the virus will be install into your system.
• Sometimes the file extensions are hided to make you fool.you can get an attachment with .txt extension(as txt files never contain executables) But in actual extension could be .vbs, .exe, .bat etc... check here for eg:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILOVEYOU
• Word files, Excel Files can also contail macro viruses, that are very harmfull.

Tip 4. Never  get Trapped into attractive ads....Download only from reputed Sites.  

• Attractive ads like:
• Jackpot...."You have won $100000" , "You are the lucky member today", "Free recharge",
• Free screen-savers, Free wallpaper, Free Mouse Icons, Free Smiles
• Free computer scan  
• Free Software
• Don't download Any software or anything else from just anywhere. Always check for reputed sites then download.

Explanation 4:

• These ads are simply a  way to attract you to steal your identity and personal information. As soon as you click on it, the stealers get into your computer.
•  Stealers are that which store all the matter you type including your username, password and send the information to the Hacker. The worst thing is these stealers are not come into notice by your antivirus.   

Tip 5: Surf Internet From a limited User Account.

• Create a limited user account on your system that does not have administrator rights. and surf web only from that limited account.

Explanation 5: 

• As limited Account does not have administrators right. So if anything does get into your system, will cannot change any main functions of your system.  

Tip 6: Don't tell Your IP to unknowns.

Explanation 6: 

• If you tell your IP to anyone then there may be chance that they can see Files in your system.

Tip 7: Turn off all java and java scripting by default

• Turn of java scripting for your browser by default and only enable it for sites that you know you can trust.

Explanation 7:

• This can change your account details, passwords, and can simply hack you.
• Recently "Free Recharge Trick" on orkut is an Example of java script. It changes the victims complete profile, join unnecessary communities, leave scrap and comments on pictures of friends, and start a new community topic in forums congaing the Free Recharge trick's link, to get more people into this trap.  See Profile of my one friend on orkut after using java script...... 

Tip 8: Never read an unsolicited e-mail

•  Do spam unsolicited emails immediately without opening.

Explanation 9: 

• Coz just by opening mail, the sender can know your IP and probably can hack u!!!

Tip 9: Always use different different passwords

•  Keep Password different  for some important account like paypal or any online banking account, other then your social account's passwords 
• Try to use different passwords for your all accounts.

Tip 10: Keep your Antivirus Up to date.

Explanation 5: 

• Antivirus updates contains the definitions of Viruses till date. So if you don't  Update it regularly, then there can be chance to get infected your system from a latest coming Virus.

Be safe :)