April 2019 - Top Speed Web Hosting

We are asked, from time to time, what advice we'd give parents and kids about learning how to navigate the Internet. The first advice we give is don't expect your kids to be able to navigate the Internet alone. It's like walking down a dark downtown alley in the middle of the night, you never know what you're going to find - maybe it will be empty and maybe you'll find a predator.  Or maybe you'll panic yell fire and all hell will break loose. 

Fake credit card processor email. Sure this message is form Mastercard/VISA, even though the website it comes from is ccsecured1srv.wufoo.com... Wufoo is a way to create and share online forms. This form makes it look like you're logging into your account so they can steal your credentials. hashtag Fun fact: dot CAT from the email address has nothing to do with cats, it was created for Catalan, the region of Eastern Spain.

Part of securing your passwords is understanding how they become compromised. Two of the most frequent ways passwords are compromised is through Brute-Force attacks and data breeches. In a Brute-Force attack, hackers are using a systematic plan to check all possibilities until the correct one is found. If a hacker knows that the site requires a minimum of 8 characters and requires the use of both alphabetical and numeric characters they will start with those parameters. This is not done by hand. They write programs to do the dirty work.

So how do you defeat attacks like this?