Security

So, I learned something important today. When you don't have an Internet access but have still got work to do, may be with a heavy heart, but you eventually end up in a library. As it turns out, reading a howto from a book is fun too. I was looking to do a crazy thing on my system(lets leave that story for some other day ) and while I was looking for something related, I came across a wonderful write up on /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files.

Before the Wget 1.12 version, in order to fetch the authenticated http/ftp pages, we had to provide the password in clear text which was quite insecure. Since that version, a new option, --ask-password, has been included which prompts the user to fill the password in a secure manner(hidden like unix passwd).

For those of you who haven't heard about Tabnabbing, its yet another form of phishing which seems to be simpler and more effective than the usual phishing attacks you would have heard of. An important thing about this attack is that it can't be detected easily, even a smart browser and a cautious web surfer can get easily fooled, leading to information theft.

Protecting one's online privacy has been one of the most popular point of concern for Internet users these days. If you don't want a website to keep track of you or if want to remain anonymous for a website, you are advised to disable cookies or use private browsing mode in your browser. But a forthcoming paper by an Electronic Frontier Foundation technologist suggests that Cookies are not be the only way to identify users, a combination of various information about the system and software collected from the browser are enough to uniquely identify a user.