" password Archives - LuxSci

Posts Tagged ‘password’

Enhancements to Application-specific Passwords

Thursday, December 17th, 2020

Since 2017, LuxSci has supported application-specific passwords.  These enable users to create distinct username/password combinations for use with different applications, devices, or for shared account access.  These login aliases can have limited privileges; for example, granting access only to email or only to web site file storage.  Use of application specific passwords can greatly enhance user security.

In the past few weeks, LuxSci has released several enhancements to application-specific passwords.

Application Specific Passwords

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HaveIBeenPwned? Selecting passwords that are not known to Hackers

Friday, September 6th, 2019

Users tend to reuse passwords to make their life simple.  This includes reusing the same passwords across multiple sites and using the same passwords for years and years.

This is bad of course.  We see it in the news so frequently that no one is surprised that millions of accounts are compromised at companies every week.  What happens to this compromised data?  Very often it is dumped online where anyone can see it.  In fact, a vast collection of compromised information from usernames and passwords to addresses to employment histories and more is or has been available online related to all of these compromised web accounts.

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Want to Keep Your Passwords Safe & Your Accounts Protected? Here’s How

Thursday, June 28th, 2018

Passwords are the bane of modern existence. Most of us have dozens or hundreds of accounts with passwords to keep track of. Many people are probably also using the same easy passwords for each of these accounts. Don’t be ashamed if that’s you because many people do it. Just be prepared to listen.

If you use the same, simple passwords for all of your accounts, you are making yourself much more vulnerable to an attack. This means that threat actors can work their way into your personal or business accounts and wreak havoc on your life and your company. If you want to minimize the chances of this happening, then you need to know how passwords can be stolen and the best ways to protect them.

How Do Attackers Get People’s Passwords?

To understand the best ways to protect your passwords, you need to know how attackers acquire them in the first place. Their methods can be simple, such as looking at the Post-It notes on someone’s monitor, or they may work in a place where they have access to customer passwords (such as the operators you talk to when you call up your bank). If these individuals abuse their positions and save customer passwords, they can try to use them on other accounts owned by the same customer, which is why you should have separate passwords for each account.

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Login security & passwords – yesterday, today and tomorrow

Wednesday, December 20th, 2017

The act of “logging in” – that is, gaining access to some private area in a shared space – has been with us since the early 60s with the introduction of time-sharing computers, albeit confined in those days to very limited professional circles. However, with the use of the public internet as a communication and social medium and the growth of the web as a platform for commerce in the past twenty years, remembering login names and passwords for access to all our online resources is as commonplace as remembering the birthdays of our loved ones. While we might remember at most ten birthdays (with the rest written down in calendars and diaries), the average person has accumulated, based on an anonymized survey of its enterprise accounts by the popular password manager vendor LastPass, about 191 online accounts!

Lest this seem like an absurdly large number, consider all the professional accounts as well as numerous personal ones accumulated over one’s online lifetime, many of which are quickly set up for some online purchase or commenting at an informational web site and then forgotten or rarely visited. These days it seems that even the slightest online activity requires creating an account and signing in. Thus, it is not surprising that most people reuse the same login credentials (user name and password) across multiple sites. Security experts have long warned against this obvious vulnerability, but who can blame the average user for choosing an easy path to manage this increasing burden of remembering multiple passwords. (Some recent statistics suggests that only 22% of online users in the US use different credentials for each online account.)

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Application Specific Passwords / Login Aliases at LuxSci

Thursday, December 14th, 2017

LuxSci now supports the creation of “application-specific passwords” for individual user accounts.

What are these?  The are essentially “login aliases.”

Increase your security through application-specific passwords
Users can create distinct username/password combinations for use with different applications, devices, or for shared account access.  These login aliases can have limited privileges; for example, granting access only to email or only to web site file storage.  Use of application specific passwords can greatly enhance user security.  In this article, we will discuss application-specific passwords, what their benefits are, and how to use them effectively.

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