Security
Maintain Your Passwords Online With KeePass
The average internet user has accounts on a number of websites. Apart from email and social networking accounts, you end up creating accounts on other websites as well. Most people use the same username and password combination across all websites; however this is an unwise practice because if one account gets compromised, the others are automatically at risk.
Smart internet users keep different passwords on the sites they use. But as the number of accounts increases, it becomes harder to maintain all the passwords. That is where KeyPass comes into play.
KeyPass is a freeware program sized at 1.5 MB and compatible with Windows operating systems. After installing the program, this is what it will look like on first run:
The second row from the top has various buttons on it. Click on the first button to set a master password. This password will need to be entered to access the information you save in KeyPass.
In conjunction to a password, you can use a file as the master password but this is optional.
After you click on the OK button and enter the master password another time, you will see newly created categories in the left pane.
You can highlight a category and use the fourth button in the second row to add a password entry in that category.
While entering a new password entry, you can add numerous details. These details include the title of the password file, and the combination of username and password. You can even add a URL, notes, and an expiration date with the password entry.
You will then see the password in KeyPass’s interface.
To select a password, simply double click on the password’s dotted view. This action will copy the password to clipboard for exactly 10 seconds.
While the password is in the clipboard, you can paste it in on the website where you need to use it.
KeyPass functions in such a way that all you need to remember is the master password. You can quickly create a new account on a site with a password which you save in KeyPass. From then on, all you have to do is copy the password from the program’s interface – no need to remember it yourself.
Needless to say, this simple procedure will appeal to many internet users. Get KeyPass from http://keepass.info/
The 7 Most Advanced (And Free To Use) System Security Tools For Windows 7
Who does not have any concern to protect his windows based PC from virus, trojans and other threats but to find a best solution to get rid of online threats is not that easy. You don’t need to worry at all and leave this responsibility on us. You might do not believe but there are many Windows security tools out there that are absolutely free and incredible. Today, I am sharing 7 Most Advanced (But Free To Use) System Security Tools For Windows 7 with all of you. These tools work great on other windows versions too. So, start reading each entry in the list and see which tool suits your needs best. Remember, we are not listing any anti virus in this post and will compile separate list very soon.
You are welcome if you want to share more free tools that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at smashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter , follow us on Google Buzz and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well
CCleaner
CCleaner is the number-one tool for cleaning your Windows PC. It protects your privacy online and makes your computer faster and more secure. Easy to use and a small, fast download.
SUPERAntiSpyware
SUPERAntiSpyware Professional features highly advanced Real-Time Protection to ensure protection from installation or re-installation of potential threats as you surf the Internet. Used in conjunction with the First Chance Prevention and Registry Protection, your computer is protected from thousands of threats that attempt to infect and infiltrate your system at startup or while shutting down your system.
Registrar Registry Manager
Registrar Registry Manager offers a very complete and safe solution to administrators and power users for maintaining the registry on both their desktops and remote computers on their network.
Eraser
Eraser is an advanced security tool for Windows which allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns.
Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware
Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware can detect and remove malware that even the most well known anti-virus and anti-malware applications fail to detect. Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware monitors every process and stops malicious processes before they even start. The realtime protection module uses our advanced heuristic scanning technology which monitors your system to keep it safe and secure.
Glary Utilities
Glary Utilities is a freeware with registry and disk cleaning, privacy protection, performance accelerator and amazing multifunctional tools. It can fix dogged registry errors, wipe off clutters, optimize internet speed, safeguard confidential files and maintain maximum performance.
Ad-Aware
Ad-Aware Free Anti-Malware features real-time protection, a rootkit removal system, e-mail scanning, automatic updates, and much more — to ensure that you have the power to protect yourself online.
Google.com Powered With SSL For Encrypted Private Searching
If you spends more time on the internet then I am sure you want more control and security over your online communication. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) connection being used for encrypting information travels on networks. Its usually recognized by a web address containing “https” or a browser lock icon, as we have seen it with many e-commerce or banking sites, well not just for banking and e-commerce, people uses it for private exchange and for processing credential information as well.
Now I am sure you got the idea of what is SSL and encryption. So, if you concern about security then Google have now added SSL encryption to their search engine https://www.google.com.
Using https://www.google.com, a very secure connection is created between Google and your browser. This secure connection between you and Google make sure the protection of your search terms and search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network. A modified logo as given above helps you to indicate that your are searching via a secure connection.
Its a beta version. So, it only covers the core web search product, I mean you wont be able to see the links of image search, books search, and news search etc, as they do not support SSL at this time. Also, as the SSL connection requires additional time to create the connection between your browser and Google, you will experience searching a bit slower than regular Google Search but, the search results will be the same.
It will not be that slow as searching over SSL dosent reduce the data sent time to Google, it only hides the data from third parties. So, if you care about security more, then you should start using Google with SSL. Personally, I like Google and their products like I am anxiously waiting for their Google Chrome OS.
Here’s how searching over SSL is different from regular Google (In their own words) :
- SSL encrypts the communication channel between Google and a searcher’s computer. When search traffic is encrypted, it can’t be read by third parties trying to access the connection between a searcher’s computer and Google’s servers. Note that the SSL protocol does have some limitations — more details are below.
- As another layer of privacy, SSL search turns off a browser’s referrers. Web browsers typically turn off referrers when going from HTTPS to HTTP mode to provide extra privacy. By clicking on a search result that takes you to an HTTP site, you could disable any customizations that the website provides based on the referrer information.
- At this time, search over SSL is supported only on Google web search. We will continue to work to support other products like Images and Maps. All features that are not supported have been removed from the left panel and the row of links at the top. You’ll continue to see integrated results like images and maps, and clicking those results will take you out of encrypted search mode.
- Your Google experience using SSL search might be slightly slower than you’re used to because your computer needs to first establish a secure connection with Google.
Luxand Blink will Log You Into Windows by Recognizing Your Face
Normally users log into Windows by selecting their username and entering their password. Suppose you are conducting an exam which requires students to log in to the Windows running computer. Any person can log in as a student if they know their username and password.
Therefore a better, more secure log in solution is required. That is exactly what Blink delivers.
Blink is a software product by Luxand, a software company that has created numerous facial imaging related applications. The function of Blink is to recognize users by their face and then log them into Windows. What makes Blink special is that it does not need to be run by the users – it automatically starts prior to any user’s logging in.
The algorithms used by Blink to recognize faces are advanced and detect the faces of users without requiring any special positioning or lighting. The advanced biometrics identification algorithms will recognize a face even if the person has recently gotten a haircut, shaved, worn or taken off their glasses.
What developers say:
Changed Haircut? Swapped Glasses for Contacts? No Problem!
Advanced biometric identification algorithms used in Blink! help it cope with changes of your personal appearance. Grow or shave off beard and mustaches, use makeup or dye you hair, wear or remove glasses or contact lenses – Blink! will let you in to your PC no matter what.
Logging in with Blink will mean that we no longer need to remember lengthy passwords. Also login attempts by unauthorized users will immediately be detected. Overall, the impact of Blink on computer usage will be immensely positive.
Blink comes as an 8MB download and is compatible with 32 bit versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7. Get the application by clicking here and remember to let us know what you think about it.
How To Organize & Manage All Your Online Passwords Securely With Mitto
I often point out how I own multiple social media accounts. Not only do I own multiple (many) social media accounts but I also own accounts on numerous websites. As a professional blogger I have reviewed many websites (I have lost count of exactly how many websites) and sometimes I need to create an account on the site to test it. When I like what the site has to offer, I keep the account active and use it every now and then.
People like me who own so many accounts face problems when it comes to password management. Keeping the same password for all our accounts is a terrible practice and should not be followed. But having differing password is not always easy to remember. Various password managers let us store our password on our computer but this means that we cannot have access to our passwords from another computer. Therefore online password managers are the best ones to go with.
One such competent online password manager is Mitto.
Mitto’s aim is to be the most secure and feature-rich free online password manager. Their password keeper is designed with a full range of features that make it easy to access all of your important password-protected sites while protecting your security from hackers and other dangerous online predators.
After signing up on Mitto, you receive an email which contains the code to activate your Mitto account. Once our email has been activated, we proceed to select the services which Mitto will be managing our passwords for.
We are then taken to the dashboard where we can see our added site on the left pane.
(In the image above, you can see that I only added a Twitter account.)
Mitto even has a bookmarklet that gives us an accessible button with which we can easily add a service to be managed to Mitto.
Check out this official mitto video to know more:
Anybody who has troubles managing multiple passwords will find Mitto to be user friendly and extremely helpful. Give this wonderful online password manager a try and let us know what you think.
Before You Go Live, Test Your Website Security With Websecurify
Website security is one of the major concerns of developers and webmasters because when their sites go live, these are in the eyes of several threats. Hence testers put lots of efforts in determining and maintaining website security. Among different techniques used to test the security of websites, testing tools are the most popular. These tools generate security-related test cases and produce in-depth reporting to analyze statistics of the tests performed. None of the tools is 100% perfect, they have their limitations instead.
Websecurify is an automated web application security scanner that scans different security parameters of your website and generates detailed statistical analysis that helps you find security loop holes so as to keep your website safe and secure.
Websecurify is free and open source so that you can extend the functionality as per your needs. It is a cross-platform application developed with JavaScript but most parts can be redeveloped with Java, Python and C.
Key features of Websecurify include:
- Improved and easy to navigate user interface.
- Engine can be taken out and integrated with other web applications.
- Results can be exported in CSV, XML, HTML and JSON.
- Supports asynchronous testing so that while it tests, it generates reports.
- Support of multiple platforms i.e. Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
- Provides an integrated browser with the support of multiple sessions. All the browser traffic is recorded and can be easily formulated.
- Records sub-transactions as well so as to make it a good choice to test AJAX applications as well.
- The design of the application is modular hence it can easily be extended.
- Provides an API to support numerous types of commercial and free testing engines.
- Support of localization so that results can be translated in multiple languages.
Is Your Site Free From SQL Injection?
SQL injection is a security exploit in which an attacker injects SQL parameters into a Web form, allowing him or her to send database queries and ultimately gain access. SQL injection is not a direct database problem but rather an application issue that indirectly affects your database systems. There are several web application vulnerability scanners to see if any input filtering or other SQL injection-specific holes exist.
SQLFury is the worlds first free online SQL Injection scanner. It is a developer tool written for the Adobe AIR runtime, this application performs SQL injection scans of a target website to identify any SQL injection vulnerabilities. SQLFury utilises blind or inband SQL injection techniques to identify vulnerable targets. If vulnerabilities are found options will be given to extract information from the database using the compromised parameter.
SQLFury works by appending your own SQL statements to a parameter which is not correctly sanitised on the server. Given a parameter with SQL injection vulnerablities SQLFury can extract, Database version, Current database user, database name, table names, columns names and entire columns.
Here are some key features of “SQLFury”:
Database Support:
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• Oracle
• Microsoft SQL Server
Extract from database:
• Database version.
• Current database user.
• All database users.
• Database name.
• All database names.
• All table names.
• All columns names.
• Entire columns.
Get SQLFury and test it to see for yourself just how useful it can be for you.
7 Awesome And Useful Software For Linux
We have lots of commercial software available to use on different platform to complete our different work, but they are not free and sometime we do not able to purchase. Don’t worry about it, today we are listing here 7 Awesome And Useful Software For Linux in which most of them are cross-platform. There are many alternative available for single software, but I just tried to list down some very similar and useful alternative. You might not be able to enjoy all the features as original software but it will really help you to perform your task in a better way when your pocket does not allow you to purchase commercial software.
You are welcome if you want to share more useful softwares for linux that we have missed here and you think our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
OpenProj is a free, open source project management solution. OpenProj is a replacement of Microsoft Project and other commercial project solutions. This is the most advanced project solution ever provided to the open source community.
Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, and it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites.
Dia is a program for creating diagrams of all kinds. The current version can do UML class diagrams, Entity-Relationship modeling, network diagrams, and much more. The engine is very flexible and dynamically loads diagram-types from disk. It stores diagrams in an XML format, but can read and write a number of different formats.
CinePaint is used to retouch feature films and in pro photography. CinePaint opens high fidelity image file formats such as DPX, 16-bit TIFF, and OpenEXR, and conventional formats like JPEG and PNG. It has a flipbook for movie playback of image sequences in RAM. It supports 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit color channels, HDR and CMS.
With KSpread you can create table-oriented sheets with information and powerful calculations with ease with good support for the OpenDocument format. For calculations there is a huge list of formulas available that allow all the expected numerical, financial and textual features that are expected in a spreadsheet.
KMyMoney intends to provide all important features found in the commercially-available, personal finance managers. KMyMoney strives to be the easiest open source personal finance manager to use, especially for the non-technical user.
Guarddog is a firewall configuration utility for Linux systems. Guarddog is aimed at two groups of users. Novice to intermediate users who are not experts in TCP/IP networking and security, and those users who don’t want the hastle of dealing with cryptic shell scripts and ipchains/iptables parameters.
ModSecurity, An Open Source Web Application Firewall
ModSecurity is a web application firewall that can work either embedded or as a reverse proxy. It provides protection from a range of attacks against web applications and allows for HTTP traffic monitoring, logging and real-time analysis.
It is also an open source project that aims to make the web application firewall technology available to everyone.
It has great features like parallel text matching, Geo IP resolution, credit card number detection, support for content injection, automated rule updates, scripting & much more. You can go and download it from here!
Protect Your Site From Abuse, Stop Spamming With reCaptcha
A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them â€â€? colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
If you run a website that suffers from problems with spam, you can put reCAPTCHA on your site. For some applications (such as WordPress and Mediawiki), we have plugins that allow you to use reCAPTCHA without writing any code. We also have easy-to-use code for common web programming languages such as PHP.
