No updates for the past while because I’ve been up to my tonsils with work. Not that I’m complaining. One of the “joys” of having your own business is the fact that you never know what’s round the corner. My business is just over three years old now, and a lot of that 3 years was spent cold-calling prospective clients, which was neither pleasant nor productive for me. Since Christmas I have done no cold-calls, and customers are beating a path to my door. I’m not sure why this is the case but I watched “The Secret” a while back and read “The Science of Getting Rich” so I’m putting it down to that.
Anyhow, I did get time last week to browse through PC Live, (Great value for just €3), and came across this article. According to a University of Maryland study, a PC connected to the internet will on average be attacked every 39 seconds.
The study also profiled brute force attacks and found the most common methods of guessing passwords. The most common was to re-enter the username or a variation of it, (eg user: admin, pwd: admin123). Other common password guesses were ‘password’, ‘passwd’, ‘test’, ‘123’, 1234′, ‘12345’, ‘123456’ and ‘1’.
Nothing too surpirsing I suppose in the guesses, but the frequency of the attacks was interesting. It also proves again the need for effective passwords, and we’ve discussed before. Make it long, mix letters, numbers and special characters, and change it on a regular basis.