Ajit Gaddam on Security & Technology

I think I came across one of the best strong password generators on the Internet at Password Chart. Picking a strong password is very important. A strong and secure password should go beyond just a simple number such as passw0rd where you replace the o with a zero(0) or a special character in the end such as password!. However, when you have to go picking numbers, special characters for a strong password of more than 7 characters, it can become hard to remember such a strong password.

For using the password chart, enter any common phrase you might use or known to you. For example, I used the phrase “the ipod rocks“. Now, using this phrase, the password chart generates a chart for you. If you are online, you can enter a password you wish to convert using this chart. You can enter a simple word or words here. For example, I used the word “zune” as a password I wished to convert to generate a strong password. I end up with a strong password of “%^Ed8u63G“. Once you generate a password chart, you can also print it out and use it for generating other strong passwords without the need to access the internet.

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The Enigma was a rotor machine used by the German Military during WW II to encrypt messages they sent to each other. It was invented by German Engineer Arthur Scherbius in 1923. The Enigma Code Machine consisted of a plugboard, three rotors and a reflector which redirected the electrical current. Each letter entered by a keyboard was matched by an encrypted letter by closing an electrical circuit which was reconfigured after each entry.

We need to use secure passwords for our everyday computing. So how about using the Enigma Code Machine to generate secure passwords for us. Dr. Frank Spiess helps us out here with a very good flash Enigma Code Machine.

A brief example: Open the machine window, click on the “Input:” textbox and enter “c” on the keyboard. The plugboard leaves C as C while highlighting the specific wire in red. The electrical current then moves to the rightmost rotor, that is, to its letter A. A is then connected to B. The current enters the middle rotor, that connects G with R. The third (leftmost) rotor maps V to I. In the next step, the reflecor maps B to R. Then the current moves way back along the green wires through the rotors back to the plugboard, where Q leads to Q. As a result, we have the encryption of C to Q. If you now enter “c” again, you see that in this case it yields G! This is because the rightmost rotor moves one step to the left before a letter is entered.

So, click here to access the Flash Enigma Code machine built by Dr.Frank Spiess

In my example of a secure password, I enter a simple plain text of “securityblog”. This plain text is converted to a cipher text by the Enigma Code Machine resulting in a secure password of “BMGNHOIPWRNB”

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Protecting yourself is very challenging in the hostile environment of the internet. Imagine a global environment where an unscrupulous person from the other side of the planet can probe your computer for weaknesses, and exploit them to gain access to your most sensitive secrets.

They can even use your computer to store data like stolen credit-card numbers or child pornography, or to attack another innocent home user or business from your system.

Here’s Kevin Mitnick’s Top 10 list of steps you should take to protect your information and your computing resources from the bad boys and girls of cyberspace.

#1. Back up everything! You are not invulnerable. Catastrophic data loss can happen to you — one worm or Trojan is all it takes.

#2. Choose passwords that are reasonably hard to guess — don’t just append a few numbers to a no-brainer. Always change default passwords.

#3. Use an antivirus product like AVG or Norton, and set it to update daily.

#4. Update your OS religiously and be vigilant in applying all security patches released by the software manufacturer.

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Sometimes when running through a CSV or any kind of a log file, you may encounter lists with a lot of duplicates. I will show an example of the simplest order here.

Say, you have a duplicates.txt that goes

one
two
three
one
four
two
four

Now, how to remove duplicates from a list such as the one shown above. If you use a command such as

sort - u < duplicates.txt or cat duplicates.txt | sort | uniq

you may end up with a list that while stripping out the duplicates, does not keep the original order

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