Friday, February 09, 2007

Hackers Attack Every 39 Seconds

Hackers attack computers every 39 seconds, according to new research.

The study, which investigated how exactly hackers crack computers, confirms those regularly issued warnings about password vulnerability. Experts advise longer passwords, regularly changed and not based on users' biographies, that mix letters and numerals and are hard to guess.

“Our data provide quantifiable evidence that attacks are happening all the time to computers with Internet connections,” study author Michel Cukier of the University of Maryland said. “The computers in our study were attacked, on average, 2,244 times a day.”

Today, hackers briefly overwhelmed at least DNS servers that help manage global computer traffic.

To test how hackers break into computers, Cukier’s team set up weak security on four Linux computers connected to the Internet and monitored hacker attacks.

Unlike the sophisticated hackers portrayed on TV and in films, these hackers weren’t targeting specific computers.

“Most of these attacks employ automated scripts that indiscriminately seek out thousands of computers at a time, looking for vulnerabilities,” Cukier said.

3 comments:

Karl L. Gechlik said...

We saw your picture that got posted to digg about MS blocking Linux mailers in hotmail! Thats some good reporting.

Any interest in participating with an article or two over @ AskTheAdmin We see you are from India and would love to pick someones brain from across the globe!

Please don't take this as spam we are a community of Admins looking to help others - for free!

Thanks for the great content keep it up! And even if you dont want to participate we would love to republish some of your goods!

_TheAdmiN_

Anonymous said...

Fucking tools. It was spam.

liberosis said...

Hey read this to know the difference between hackers and crackers - Hackers are not crackers