4 Ways to Avoid Packet Sniffing and Data Theft
Last week on the freeware review, I wrote about the simplicity of packet sniffing and analyzing with Ethereal. I revealed how easy it was for anyone to tap sensitive data like login information, credit card numbers, social security number, and mission-critical emails traveling on the network. As promised, I will reveal how to actually prevent packet-sniffing software from reading your sensitive data.
As I previously explained, packet analysis passively listens into a network and then extracts the important data, which is usually in plaintext. The key to hampering packet analysis is encrypting that data sent on the network so that it is not read in plain text. The encrypted data that packet analyzers gather is pretty useless without an encryption key. While it is possible for crackers to obtain the key, encryption makes the process a lot longer (and sometimes nearly impossible). There are a couple common ways to do this.
Read the rest of this entry »
When I was in high school, I used to be involved in the desktop publishing department. Essentially, I was a yearbook geek. In most places, you receive your yearbook towards the last month of school. I’ve even heard of some schools distributing yearbooks from the previous year in August! In addition to the regular yearbook, our academy released a “pre-yearbook” in the first month of school so we can get used to all the (few) new faces. I’ve also attended other institutions with a similar publication. They called it “The Dating Catalog” or “The Mugshots.” We called ours the “JCA Buddy List.” That year, we designed the pages in sharp color as opposed to the previous year’s blurry black-and-white.