Month: September 2023
Bad news – turns out even long passwords can be cracked easily
New research claims even long strings appear on the list of the most commonly compromised passwords.
If you thought using a longer password is better for your security than a short one, then you may want to think again.
New research from Specops Software has found that even passwords 15 characters long make it into the top ten of the most common password lengths to be compromised (placing eighth). The most compromised length was eight characters, accounting for 212.5 million out four billion in the company’s Breached Password Protection Database.
Specops surmises that this is the most common since eight characters is the default length for Active Directory passwords. As expected, as the character length increases, the share of compromised passwords decreases.
Time to crack
This led Darren James, Senior Product Manager at Specops Software, to conclude, “longer passwords are better… however, it’s important to understand that equipping users with strong, lengthy passwords isn’t a foolproof way to avoid compromised credentials.”
He added, “attackers can still find workarounds – and user behavior can undo a good password policy.”
When it comes to the actual content of the passwords themselves, it is again not much of a surprise that topping the list for eight character phrases is “password”. For 15 characters, the phrase ‘Sym_newhire’ appears as the second and third most commonly compromised passwords – “Sym_newhireOEIE” and “Sym_newhireOAIE”.
It is essential for business to have strong passwords, as Specops also cites figures from Verizon that claim that a massive 86% of all attacks begin by making use of stolen credentials.
Increasing length can safeguard against brute force cracking. Specops calculates that to crack an eight character password, even those that contain numbers and both upper and lower case characters, can take a mere five minutes. On the other hand, a 15 character password can take up to 37 million years to crack.
However, the report warns that this “shouldn’t give organizations a false sense of security, as this is only part of the password security battle.” For instance, it won’t matter if the credentials are stolen via phishing attacks.
Using one of the best business password manager solutions can help to secure your passwords further, as they often come with dark web monitoring features that notify users if any of stored credentials have been leaked in a known data breach.
Looking further ahead, though, the whole discussion may be academic, since passkeys, the new passwordless technology that is taking hold, mean there are no credentials that can be cracked or even phished. Some identity management solutions and business password managers are giving enterprise this capability already.
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A revelation about trees is messing with climate calculations
Scientists are learning more about “sesquiterpenes” vapors made from trees.
Enlarge / The early morning sun shines through the morning fog on the countryside in Chongqing, China, September 14, 2023. (credit: Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Every year between September and December, Lubna Dada makes clouds. Dada, an atmospheric scientist, convenes with dozens of her colleagues to run experiments in a 7,000-gallon stainless steel chamber at CERN in Switzerland. “It’s like science camp,” says Dada, who studies how natural emissions react with ozone to create aerosols that affect the climate.
Clouds are the largest source of uncertainty in climate predictions. Depending on location, cloud cover can reflect sunlight away from land and ocean that would otherwise absorb its heat—a rare perk in the warming world. But clouds can also trap heat over Arctic and Antarctic ice. Scientists want to know more about what causes clouds to form, and if that effect is cooling or heating. And most of all, says Dada, “We want to know how we humans have changed clouds.”
In the sky, aerosol particles attract water vapor or ice. When the tiny wet globs get large enough, they become seeds for clouds. Half of Earth’s cloud cover forms around stuff like sand, salt, soot, smoke, and dust. The other half nucleates around vapors released by living things or machines, like the sulfur dioxide that arises from burning fossil fuels.
Some Walmart delivery drivers are buying their credentials online — letting anyone deliver goods to your door
submitted by /u/franziscojr [link] [comments]
submitted by /u/franziscojr
[link] [comments]
AMD has a new trick to make games run smoother – but only for RX 7000 GPUs
Arriving alongside FSR 3, Fluid Motion Frames could arguably have more impact, certainly in the short-term.
All the focus has been on FSR 3 launching yesterday (finally), but AMD has also implemented a separate Fluid Motion Frame feature at a driver level, which aims to boost frame rates considerably using frame generation tech.
What’s the difference between these technologies? We’ll come back to that in a moment, but the key thing to know about AMD’s Fluid Motion Frame (AFMF) tech is that as it’s a driver capability, it can be applied to games without the developer having to incorporate support (as is necessary with FSR 3).
What does it do? AFMF literally sticks in extra frames (engages in frame generation) for the game to increase the frames per second (fps) count. The result is an artificially smoother experience for the frame rate.
As VideoCardz reports, there are some initial catches. Firstly, AFMF is still in beta, only having been released in AMD’s Adrenalin preview driver, and it officially supports 12 games right now (including Starfield – check out the full list below).
A Plague Tale – RequiemBorderlands 3ControlDead SpaceDeep Rock GalacticDying Light 2Far CryGhostwire: TokyoHitman 3Hogwarts LegacyHorizon Zero DawnMetro Exodus Enhanced EditionRed Dead Redemption 2Resident Evil 3Resident Evil 4Shadow of the Tomb RaiderStar Wars Jedi: SurvivorStarfieldThe Last of Us Part 1The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
As well as those caveats, also bear in mind this feature is only available for AMD’s current-gen (RX 7000 family) graphics cards.
Analysis: An exciting new world of smoother gaming – with some catches
So, where is the line drawn between FSR 3 and AFMF? Well, the latter is frame generation on the driver side, and an advanced form of that is included in FSR 3 (along with its upscaling chops and so forth).
You can basically think of it as FSR 3 gets fancy frame generation (which is also in Nvidia DLSS 3, of course) plus more besides, whereas AFMF provides a dumbed-down version of it – but with the considerable plus point that it’s available with a lot wider support.
It’ll be applicable to a whole host of games, then, but AFMF won’t be nearly as good as FSR 3 and its frame generation quality (of course, or FSR 3 would be rather redundant). The other thing to remember is that AFMF will of course be exclusive to AMD Radeon GPUs as it’s in the Adrenalin driver, and as mentioned, it’s RDNA 3 graphics cards-only to kick off.
Eventually, we may see it come to more of the GPUs on our list of AMD’s best graphics cards, and we can certainly hope that the RX 6000 family will be catered for.
While a dozen games are officially supported as mentioned, as AMD makes clear, you can enable AFMF for any DX11 or DX12 game using the per-app settings in the Adrenalin software.
With this still being the early stages of AFMF, though, the results are likely to be unpredictable.
AMD throws in a bunch of caveats for those who will be experimenting with AFMF, and that includes the fact that: “AFMF can introduce additional latency in games and is recommended to be combined with AMD Radeon Anti-Lag/Anti-Lag+ for the optimal experience.”
Team Red adds that: “As AFMF may introduce additional latency in games, AFMF may not offer the optimal experience in fast-paced competitive titles.”
Right now, you’ll need to play full-screen to use AFMF as well, with no HDR, and V-Sync disabled, and ideally, FreeSync is recommended for the best experience with this frame rate generation tech, too.
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NSA Is Starting an AI Security Center
The Associated Press reports: The National Security Agency is starting an artificial intelligence security center — a crucial mission as AI capabilities are increasingly acquired, developed and integrated into U.S. defense and intelligence systems, the agency’s outgoing director announced Thursday. Army Gen. Paul Nakasone said the center would be incorporated into the NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, where it works with private industry and international partners to harden the U.S. defense-industrial base against threats from adversaries led by China and Russia.
Nakasone was asked about using AI to automate the analysis of threat vectors and red-flag alerts — and he reminded the audience that U.S. intelligence and defense agencies already use AI. “AI helps us, But our decisions are made by humans. And that’s an important distinction,” Nakasone said. “We do see assistance from artificial intelligence. But at the end of the day, decisions will be made by humans and humans in the loop.”
Nakasone said it would become “NSA’s focal point for leveraging foreign intelligence insights, contributing to the development of best practices guidelines, principles, evaluation, methodology and risk frameworks” for both AI security and the goal of promoting the secure development and adoption of AI within “our national security systems and our defense industrial base.” He said it would work closely with U.S. industry, national labs, academia and the Department of Defense as well as international partners.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Associated Press reports: The National Security Agency is starting an artificial intelligence security center — a crucial mission as AI capabilities are increasingly acquired, developed and integrated into U.S. defense and intelligence systems, the agency’s outgoing director announced Thursday. Army Gen. Paul Nakasone said the center would be incorporated into the NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, where it works with private industry and international partners to harden the U.S. defense-industrial base against threats from adversaries led by China and Russia.
Nakasone was asked about using AI to automate the analysis of threat vectors and red-flag alerts — and he reminded the audience that U.S. intelligence and defense agencies already use AI. “AI helps us, But our decisions are made by humans. And that’s an important distinction,” Nakasone said. “We do see assistance from artificial intelligence. But at the end of the day, decisions will be made by humans and humans in the loop.”
Nakasone said it would become “NSA’s focal point for leveraging foreign intelligence insights, contributing to the development of best practices guidelines, principles, evaluation, methodology and risk frameworks” for both AI security and the goal of promoting the secure development and adoption of AI within “our national security systems and our defense industrial base.” He said it would work closely with U.S. industry, national labs, academia and the Department of Defense as well as international partners.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.