9 ways your account can be Hacked, even with a super-strong password.

Summary: Strong passwords are important, but they don't protect you from everything. I'll look at other ways that your account can be compromised.

I sometimes play a game online to pass the time. It's a simulation type of game but I like it. One day I logged into my account and realized that someone had changed the password and taken all my stuff. How is it possible that they've hacked my account? My password has plenty of characters, is almost impossible to guess because it sounds like random gibberish to everyone else except myself, and there are plenty of numbers and secret characters in it. Is it true that they used a hacking device or program of some sort to hack my account?

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I can't say what could have happened in your case, specifically.
However...
I can think of a number of ways your account could have been compromised.

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OK, you've got a great password - something like 0jrkdiGv5Q@n - something that is not going to be guessed, and certainly no current computer is going to get to in the next century by trying all possible combinations.
What else could go wrong?

"It's great that you have a strong password - that already puts you ahead of the majority of computer users ..."

• You have a key-logger. Key loggers, short for keystroke loggers, are malicious programs that are installed and transmitted as viruses or spyware. Once your computer is infected with a key logger it could be recording every keystroke you press, and then sending that off to some central "hacker headquarters" where the results are analyzed and account login IDs and passwords are extracted. By the way, "keystroke logger" is a misnomer these days. Just about anything you do can be recorded, including mouse clicks, screen shots, and even network traffic, rendering most of the ways to supposedly "bypass" keystroke loggers completely ineffectual.
• You logged in on a public computer. Not only can public computers be completely infested with malware including the aforementioned keyloggers, but they can also have hardware logging devices installed. Even if you scanned, you'd never tell from the software installed that your keystrokes and all that other activity might be captured by a device attached to or inside the computer itself.
• You've been phished. This is happening a lot, particularly in online games. You receive a message supposedly from the game administrator that you need to visit a web site to gain access to some in-game bonus, or validate your account or risk being banned. When you go to that site you have to login and ... you just gave your login information to a hacker. Phishing is, of course, not limited to these in-game messages - they can be just about anything to get you to divulge your username and password.
• Your password is great, but your security questions? Not so much. Security questions are often used to validate that you are who you say you are when you click the "I forgot my password" link when attempting to access your account. If those security questions are the all too typical simple kind like your birthplace or favorite color, my guess is that someone who either knows you or has read your profiles on social media sites can probably answer them. If they can answer them many times that means that they can gain access to your account. This varies depending on exactly how the security questions are used, but it's very common.
• You logged in over an open WiFi connection. This could be while at Starbucks or some public location that has open WiFi. It could even be your own home if you've not enabled WPA encryption on your wireless access point. I'd be shocked if the game you're playing encrypted its login transactions, or for that matter any part of the game experience. That means that anyone within range (meaning perhaps within a few hundred feet) could "listen in" to your network conversation and see your login ID and password as they passed by from your computer to the gaming or other server.
• You walked away while logged in and someone walked up to your computer and changed your password. Or changed your security questions. Or changed your email address associated with the account so that they could later say "I forgot my password" and "recover" access to your account.
• You left your computer accessible. There's no substitute for physical security if someone can just walk up to your computer and start searching for things that might help them. If your game allows you to remember login IDs or passwords, those are probably accessible somewhere and anyone with physical access to your machine could conceivably find them. Even a Windows password is not enough, since those are easily bypassed or reset by someone with the proper knowledge and tools.
• You told a friend. Sadly this happens more often than we think. Sometimes the easiest way to share something is to just let your friend (or spouse, or child, or parent, or ...) login "as" you - so you give them the password. Later when they're angry or hurt or no longer your friend they can login and change your password thereby locking you out.
• Someone watched you login. "Shoulder Surfing", as it's known, is as simple as it sounds - letting someone watch you type in your password could be enough for them to memorize the keys you typed. It's not necessarily easy, but depending on how you type and how well that person watches and remembers, it's not an uncommon way to get a password - even a complex one.

It's great that you have a strong password - that already puts you ahead of the majority of computer users, sad to say. But it's not something that protects you from all threats. Be aware of the scenarios I've listed, and for those that you think might apply take appropriate steps to minimize the risk.

What is "ping", and what does its output tell me?

Summary: One of the oldest diagnostic tools, ping simply validates connectivity from point A to point B and doing so provides additional useful information.

Sometimes when I search for solutions for my home networking problem, I frequently see some people suggesting that I ping my PC by IP and/or by computer name. What does PING command actually do? What's the point of using this command? How do we read and understand the results (sent, received, and lost) of the packets?

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Ping is perhaps one of the oldest and most basic network diagnostic tools. In concept the tool is very, very simple: it sends out an "are you there?" kind of request, and expects to hear back a "yes, here I am!" kind of response.
Very basic, very simple, and yet very powerful as a first line of network diagnosis.

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The ping command runs in a Windows Command Shell (or a Linux/Mac/BSD/Solaris/etc. terminal window - it's a very ubiquitous command), and has a very basic syntax at it's core:

ping domain_name

For example, if you open up a command window and type in "ping google.co.in", you'll see something like this:

[C:\]ping google.co.in

Pinging google.co.in [209.85.231.104] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 209.85.231.104: bytes=32 time=111ms TTL=50
Reply from 209.85.231.104: bytes=32 time=101ms TTL=50
Reply from 209.85.231.104: bytes=32 time=96ms TTL=50
Reply from 209.85.231.104: bytes=32 time=99ms TTL=50

Ping statistics for 209.85.231.104:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 96ms, Maximum = 111ms, Average = 101ms

"the tool is very, very simple: it sends out an 'are you there?' ... and expects to hear back a 'yes, here I am!'"

There's a lot of information here, and I'm not going to get into all the geeky details, but here are some of the basic, and important things that ping does:

• "Pinging google.co.in [209.85.231.104]" - Ping only pings IP addresses so the first thing it did when I asked it to ping "google.co.in" is it looked up the corresponding IP address. This is perhaps one of the quickest ways I know of to determine the IP address associated with a domain. Also, if this look-up fails, you'll know that there's a typo in the domain name, or the domain name look-up (DNS) is failing for some reason.
• "Reply from 209.85.231.104:" - this tells you that the remote server at that IP address replied, obviously. What that means, though, is that the entire route across the internet, from your machine through routers and switches and networking equipment and whatever else, worked. As did the return path carrying the server's reply. If this fails, ("timed out") then something along the connection between you and the server might be broken, the server might be off line, or the server might not even exist. It's also possible that the server is explicitly configured not to respond to ping requests.
• "time=101ms" - this is the round trip time; the time between sending the "are you there?" and receiving the "yes I am!". In this case, 101 milliseconds. Since the ping is repeated several times you can see that this time is fairly consistent, which is good. The time will vary depending on many factors including how close you are to the remote server, how many routers and other networking equipment are in between you and that server, and more. In the example above, the ping was from me in the Seattle area to the google! server housed in India. A quick test of a ping to a server in Japan resulted in times twice as long.
• "Sent = 4, Received = 4" - one of the things that TCP/IP is designed to deal with is packet loss. Ideally, every packet you send should get to where it's going, but for various reasons that doesn't always happen. As long as the packets can get there after a retry or two, in normal usage you'd never notice. Ping sends multiple packets and reports specifically on the success rate, so that you can see if a particular connection is prone to packet loss.
• "Approximate round trip times" - while on average the same kind of packet sent to the same destination should take roughly the same amount of time, that's also not always the case. Sometimes for reasons as diverse as the equipment and paths that the packets take, some take longer than others. Ping reports these statistics so that you can see if a particular connection is prone to this type of problem.

Ping also includes several options (type "ping -?" for a list), but the simplest use as above is probably the most common.
There's one usage that is not intuitive, and yet something I use all the time. As you've seen above, ping can be used to quickly translate an domain name into its corresponding IP address (i.e. "google.co.in" into "72.3.133.152"), but it can also do the reverse:

[C:\]ping -a 72.3.133.152

Pinging pugetsoundsoftware.com [72.3.133.152] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 72.3.133.152: bytes=32 time=67ms TTL=47
...

Using the "-a" switch to ping, and giving it an IP address, ping does what's called a reverse lookup and displays a domain name that is assigned to that IP address. This is very handy at times since many IP addresses are also assigned fairly descriptive domain names.
Note: in the example above you'll see I used the IP address for "advcomp.co.cc", and yet ping reported that IP as being "google.com". This is simply because any single IP address can be assigned any number of domain names, so ping just reports the first one it finds. For a more complete list of domain names associated with an IP address you'll need to use a service like MyIPNeighbors, which given an IP address will list the domains that share that IP address, and likely all reside on the same server.
Aside from a quick tool for DNS and reverse-DNS look-ups, ping is most commonly used simply to verify basic connectivity between two machines. The ping service is typically one of the first, and simplest services to be loaded onto a server, and runs independently of any other. It's not uncommon at all for a server who's websites are inaccessible because of a software problem to still respond to a ping. That typically helps determine that there's not a connectivity problem, but rather a problem on the server itself.
It's also worth noting that some servers actively disable responding to ping requests for assorted security related reasons. For example, even though the server is most definitely up and running, you typically cannot ping "microsoft.com", but on the other hand you can ping "google.com". In fact, pinging a site like "google.com" or "yahoo.com" is often a quick way to ensure that your own internet connection is, in fact, working.

Difference Between http and https

The significance of S:

Http or the hypertext transfer protocol is something we use when we access the internet. Though we seldom notice it if at all, it plays a very essential role. Http defines the methodology and rules of transporting data from the servers of the site we like to view down to our computer and vice versa. To most of us non-technical people, this should no longer be our concern just as long as we get what we asked the server for.

The problem with http though is that it is vulnerable to people who might want to eavesdrop or see what your activity is all about. This too shouldn’t really be a serious problem if all you are doing is watching stupid videos in youtube or googling your assignment. Most of our activity on the internet isn’t really that important for people to really care about. And even though it is there to see, no one who knows how to do it would actually bother to waste the time or face the possible legal implications of such acts.

The true problem arises when you are sending or receiving data that is confidential or sensitive. You sure wouldn’t want other people knowing what your personal emails contain. Private messages should stay private. Then there are on-line transactions, when you buy something and you pay for it with your credit card, your credit card number gets sent across the internet every time. And if you are using http to do this then it should be real easy for malicious people to do harm to you or your finances.

The Internet’s answer to this is https or HTTP over SSL is a secured connection that transmits data over the internet in an encrypted form. This security method means that even if someone is eavesdropping, the data they get would not be comprehensible or usable because they don’t have the means to decrypt it. The entire message is decrypted only when it arrives at its designated location.

So why don’t we shift everything to https? So that everything is secured. Although that is possible, it isn’t very advisable. Transmitting data via https require additional processing power to encrypt/decrypt the data. When you think about the servers who process millions if not billions of data in a day, that could result In massive slowdowns. That is why https is only used in certain pages that contain sensitive information like credit card numbers or passwords.

Learn how to send your fake email

So, you want to learn how to send your own fake mail? It’s extraordinarily easy to do, and requires no extra software installed on your PC at all. It can be done with Windows, Macintosh, Linux – any modern PC that has an internet connection will do it.

There are a just a few simple steps. First, you’ll need to decide on the FROM and the TO email addresses. If the FROM address that you’re choosing isn’t a real one, make sure that the domain name (the bit after the @ sign) is a real one. If it’s not a real one, it almost certainly won’t work.


For the purpose of this tutorial, we’ll be sending from bush@whitehouse.gov to dummy@anysite.com.

Second, you’ll need to find out the mail server that your recipient is using.

Click Start, Run, enter “CMD”, then presss OK. In the window that comes up, type nslookup -q=MX anysite.com
Go to Applications, Utilities, and choose Terminal. In the window that comes up, type nslookup -q=MX anysite.com
Bring up your favourite shell, and type nslookup -q=MX anysite.com
There will be a lot of information on the screen – all you need to look for is a line that talks about a mail exchanger. If there are several, pick the one with the lowest “preference number”.

anysite.com MX preference = 10, mail exchanger = mail.anysite.com
Now, you’ll need to connect to this mail exchanger using telnet. This is the same for any PC, but Vista users may not have it installed by default – see this note about getting telnet on Vista before you continue. When you’re ready, type:

telnet mail.anysite.com 25
Press enter, and after a short pause, you should see a welcome message from the server.

Ok, so now you’re connected. You need to enter the following information – press ENTER at each new line. You won’t be able to press backspace to delete a mistake, so you’ll need to type everything correctly first time!

HELO whitehouse.gov
This tells the mail server that we are “whitehouse.gov”.

MAIL FROM:
This tells the server who is sending the mail.

RCPT TO:
This tells the server who to deliver the mail to. At this point, if the recipient doesn’t exist, you may see a warning message (but not always).

DATA
This tells the server that we’re ready to start writing our message. It should acknowledge, telling you to end your message with a full stop (period) on a single line. All we need to do now, is write our message and don’t forget that full stop at the end.
Hello dummy@anysite, I managed to send a fake mail all by myself!.
Dont forget that last dot. When you’ve done that, and pressed enter, simply enter QUIT and your mail should be delivered.

There’s a little bit more to it, of course. You’ll need to enter proper “headers” if you want the mail to look more believable. After doing the DATA command, I’d recommend pasting in the following “headers” to make sure it looks realistic when viewed in Outlook, Hotmail, etc.

Date: Sun, 01 Apr 2007 12:49:13 +0100 (BST)From: George W Bush To: Poor Sod Subject: Fake mail

Hello dummy@anysite, I managed to send a fake mail all by myself!.
And that’s all there is to it.

Speed up your torrents

These days use of torrent has increased tremendously and it is qiute easy also even I prefer torrent to any other site but the problem is that it is slower than other websites. But where there is a problem there is a solution. Following are the 5 ways in which you can speed up your Torrent. Try it!

1. Cap your upload (most important)

Limit your upload speed to approximately 80 percent of your maximum upload rate. You can check your upload speed over here (never trust your isp). Once you know your maximum upload speed, change the max upload (to 80%) speed in your torrent client’s preferences.

Don’t get me wrong, everyone should share as much as possible, but if your upload rate reached it’s max, your download rate suffers significantly.

2. Hack the max TCP connections

If you’re on XP sp2, your TCP connections are limited to a maximum of 10. This seriously hurts your downloading speed because it wont let you connect to a high amount of ip numbers. It is supposed to slow down viruses because their spreading strategy is to connect to a high amount of ip numbers, but it also cripples your torrent downloads.
A nice way to fix this is to download this patch, it allows you to set the maximum allowed connections to any number you want. Any number between 50 and 100 is ok .

3. Check seeds and peers

A simple tip, but o so important. Always look for torrents with the best seed/peer ratio. The more seeds (compared to peers) the better (in general). So 50 seeds and 50 peers is better than 500 seeds and 1000 peers. So, be selective.

4. Change the default port.

By default, BitTorrent uses a port 6881-6999. BitTorrent accounts for a lot of the total internet traffic (1/3), so isp’s like to limit the connection offered on the these ports. So, you should change these to another range. Good clients allow you to do this, just choose anything you like. If you’re behind a router, make sure you have the ports forwarded or UPnP enabled.

5. Disable Windows Firewall

It sucks. Windows Firewall hates P2P and often leads a life of it’s own. So disable it and get yourself a decent firewall, Kerio or Zone Alarm for example.

Last but not least… Buy a faster connection…

20 Great Google

Google is clearly the best general-purpose search engine on the Web

But most people don’t use it to its best advantage. Do you just plug in a keyword or two and hope for the best? That may be the quickest way to search, but with more than 3 billion pages in Google’s index, it’s still a struggle to pare results to a manageable number.

But Google is an remarkably powerful tool that can ease and enhance your Internet exploration. Google’s search options go beyond simple keywords, the Web, and even its own programmers. Let’s look at some of Google’s lesser-known options.

Syntax Search Tricks
Using a special syntax is a way to tell Google that you want to restrict your searches to certain elements or characteristics of Web pages. Google has a fairly complete list of its syntax elements at:

www.google.com/help/operators.html

Here are some advanced operators that can help narrow down your search results.

Intitle: at the beginning of a query word or phrase (intitle:”Three Blind Mice”) restricts your search results to just the titles of Web pages.

Intext: does the opposite of intitle:, searching only the body text, ignoring titles, links, and so forth. Intext: is perfect when what you’re searching for might commonly appear in URLs. If you’re looking for the term HTML, for example, and you don’t want to get results such as

www.mysite.com/index.html

You can also enter intext:html.

Link: lets you see which pages are linking to your Web page or to another page you’re interested in. For example, try typing in

link:http://www.mdzahidabbas.blogspot.com

Try using site: (which restricts results to top-level domains) with intitle: to find certain types of pages. For example, get scholarly pages about Mark Twain by searching for intitle:”Mark Twain”site:edu. Experiment with mixing various elements; you’ll develop several strategies for finding the stuff you want more effectively. The site: command is very helpful as an alternative to the mediocre search engines built into many sites.

Swiss Army Google
Google has a number of services that can help you accomplish tasks you may never have thought to use Google for. For example, the new calculator feature

(www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator)

Lets you do both math and a variety of conversions from the search box. For extra fun, try the query “Answer to life the universe and everything.”

Let Google help you figure out whether you’ve got the right spelling—and the right word—for your search. Enter a misspelled word or phrase into the query box (try “thre blund mise”) and Google may suggest a proper spelling. This doesn’t always succeed; it works best when the word you’re searching for can be found in a dictionary. Once you search for a properly spelled word, look at the results page, which repeats your query. (If you’re searching for “three blind mice,” underneath the search window will appear a statement such as Searched the web for “three blind mice.”) You’ll discover that you can click on each word in your search phrase and get a definition from a dictionary.

Suppose you want to contact someone and don’t have his phone number handy. Google can help you with that, too. Just enter a name, city, and state. (The city is optional, but you must enter a state.) If a phone number matches the listing, you’ll see it at the top of the search results along with a map link to the address. If you’d rather restrict your results, use rphonebook: for residential listings or bphonebook: for business listings. If you’d rather use a search form for business phone listings, try Yellow Search

(www.buzztoolbox.com/google/yellowsearch.shtml).

Extended Googling

Google offers several services that give you a head start in focusing your search. Google Groups

(http://groups.google.com)

indexes literally millions of messages from decades of discussion on Usenet. Google even helps you with your shopping via two tools: Froogle
CODE
(http://froogle.google.com),

which indexes products from online stores, and Google Catalogs
CODE
(http://catalogs.google.com),

which features products from more 6,000 paper catalogs in a searchable index. And this only scratches the surface. You can get a complete list of Google’s tools and services at

www.google.com/options/index.html

You’re probably used to using Google in your browser. But have you ever thought of using Google outside your browser?
Google Alert

(www.googlealert.com)

monitors your search terms and e-mails you information about new additions to Google’s Web index. (Google Alert is not affiliated with Google; it uses Google’s Web services API to perform its searches.) If you’re more interested in news stories than general Web content, check out the beta version of Google News Alerts

(www.google.com/newsalerts).

This service (which is affiliated with Google) will monitor up to 50 news queries per e-mail address and send you information about news stories that match your query. (Hint: Use the intitle: and source: syntax elements with Google News to limit the number of alerts you get.)

Google on the telephone? Yup. This service is brought to you by the folks at Google Labs

(http://labs.google.com),

a place for experimental Google ideas and features (which may come and go, so what’s there at this writing might not be there when you decide to check it out). With Google Voice Search

(http://labs1.google.com/gvs.html),

you dial the Voice Search phone number, speak your keywords, and then click on the indicated link. Every time you say a new search term, the results page will refresh with your new query (you must have JavaScript enabled for this to work). Remember, this service is still in an experimental phase, so don’t expect 100 percent success.

In 2002, Google released the Google API (application programming interface), a way for programmers to access Google’s search engine results without violating the Google Terms of Service. A lot of people have created useful (and occasionally not-so-useful but interesting) applications not available from Google itself, such as Google Alert. For many applications, you’ll need an API key, which is available free from
CODE
www.google.com/apis

Thanks to its many different search properties, Google goes far beyond a regular search engine. Give the tricks in this article a try. You’ll be amazed at how many different ways Google can improve your Internet searching.

Online Extra: More Google Tips

Here are a few more clever ways to tweak your Google searches.

Search Within a Timeframe

Daterange: (start date–end date). You can restrict your searches to pages that were indexed within a certain time period. Daterange: searches by when Google indexed a page, not when the page itself was created. This operator can help you ensure that results will have fresh content (by using recent dates), or you can use it to avoid a topic’s current-news blizzard and concentrate only on older results. Daterange: is actually more useful if you go elsewhere to take advantage of it, because daterange: requires Julian dates, not standard Gregorian dates. You can find converters on the Web (such as

CODE
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.html

excl.gif No Active Links, Read the Rules - Edit by Ninja excl.gif), but an easier way is to do a Google daterange: search by filling in a form at

www.researchbuzz.com/toolbox/goofresh.shtml or www.faganfinder.com/engines/google.shtml

If one special syntax element is good, two must be better, right? Sometimes. Though some operators can’t be mixed (you can’t use the link: operator with anything else) many can be, quickly narrowing your results to a less overwhelming number.

More Google API Applications

Staggernation.com offers three tools based on the Google API. The Google API Web Search by Host (GAWSH) lists the Web hosts of the results for a given query

(www.staggernation.com/gawsh/).

When you click on the triangle next to each host, you get a list of results for that host. The Google API Relation Browsing Outliner (GARBO) is a little more complicated: You enter a URL and choose whether you want pages that related to the URL or linked to the URL

(www.staggernation.com/garbo/).

Click on the triangle next to an URL to get a list of pages linked or related to that particular URL. CapeMail is an e-mail search application that allows you to send an e-mail to google@capeclear.com with the text of your query in the subject line and get the first ten results for that query back. Maybe it’s not something you’d do every day, but if your cell phone does e-mail and doesn’t do Web browsing, this is a very handy address to know.