twitter security

Disclaimer: This is too long to fit in a twitter post so I’m using my blog.

Introduction: The past few weeks when I’ve tried to use my twitter account, but I’ve been “Locked out!” and get this message from the website:

                ” We’ve temporarily locked your account after too many failed attempts to sign in. Please chillax for a few, then try again.”

Since I have not logged in to twitter in a couple of days that means something or someone is trying to hack my account. I’ve noticed several of my friends have had their accounts hacked and used to post ads or links to harmful software and/or websites. I have yet to have mine sucessfully hacked; however, my password is currently fairly weak. (When I can log on to it again I will reinforce it with a stronger password)

The problem: twitter is an open source software that provides it’s code to the public so anyone can develop web apps, iPhone apps, desktop gadgets, etc that interact with their servers. This just makes it easier for scammers, spammers, and hackers to understand the system and what they need to do to get your account info.

How they do it: the organization or individual gets the tools from twitter to “develop an app” of some sort and use it to develop an account hacker program that types in random usernames until it finds a legitimate username and then tries to guess their password using common words and number combinations. (typically cross-referencing a dictionary database)

How to keep your account safe: this applies to twitter, facebook, or anything computer related really. Use a strong password that is not easily guessed. It is important to use a password that you can remember; however, by just typing in something like “dorothyKansas”(without quotes) is going to be picked up on quickly by these password generating programs. If The Wizard of Oz is what you make your password off of I would recommend redoing the aforementioned password as “d0r0tH3k4Ns45?!”(without quotes). This is a process called leet speak, which replaces letters with numbers that resemble that letter. It is like when you’re in algebra class in grade school and you’re trying to spell your name out on the calculator… . In this example, I’ve replaced the letter ‘o’ with the number ’0′ and capitalized arbitrary letters (some, but not all passwords are casesensitive, case sensitivity adds much more security) then I replaced the letter ‘y’ with a ’3′ as in the worth “Dorothy” the ‘y’ sounds like an ‘e’ and an ‘E’ looks like a ’3′. Finally, I added arbitrary characters at the end, using “!,$,&,*,+, |,}” or any other key on your keyboard is helpful (some sites do not accept some, or any of these characters).

Notes on passwords: we look at an ‘a’ and an ‘A’ as the same character and a space is nothing at all. After all, we’re taught from preschool that lower and upper case letters are the same thing; however, to a computer they’re not. Each character on a keyboard represents a command that you send to the processor and when you push that shift key you’re sending an entirely different command. Thus, just by capitalizing letters that you would not normally capilalize adds a whole nother level of security to your password.  Also,  very few people think about the shift+’number key’ characters, especially when it comes to passwords. Using these in your password helps as well.

Conclusion: Many of the people hacking twitter are just looking to use you to advertise their site, product, or virus.  They’re also lazy. The software they develop to hack you is only programmed to run off a database of words and commonly used characters. Basically they cross reference a dictionary database with your password entry field and hope they eventually get lucky. When we take the time to really secure our passwords, these people will typically fail; we’re not worth their time when they can easily hack someone less careful. It’s like being in a neighborhood you don’t live in with a laptop. You’re going to keep driving slowing down the road until you find the family that has no password on their wireless network before trying to guess the password on the network that does have a password. Most websites have a fail-safe mechanism that locks the account when it is attempted too many times, like my twitter account; this is great, but is an untimely  obstical to the user- especfially if its your bank account and bills are due today. Finally, the most important thing with passwords is being random, a randomly picked password has no affiliation with it’s user. If I love Mountain Dew, and everyone knows that, then my computer password very well may be “Mountain Dew,” “mt.d3w,” or “m0uT41Nd3M,” which would be good and solid against this twitter hacker, but not so much if someone were in my office trying to access my files for some odd reason.

Keeping your passwords safe is extremely important in this time of digital identity theft. Anytime you’re on an unsecure website you need to know any information, passwords, or credit card numbers you provide on that site are at risk. However, by taking just a few moments to think about the passwords we create can greatly increase our safety.

Final note: It is much easier and conveinent to have just one password for all of your websites you visit. Afterall, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Amazon, Ebay,… and the list goes on… , they all require a username/ email and password. If your username is your email and your password is comprimised on one of these sites then all of your sites are comprimised. If an actual person is behind it, they may go and try those very same username/ password combination on your other sites leaving you very unhappy. I recommend purchasing a jump/thumb/flash drive that is dirt cheap, but good quality. Get one with just 1GB of space on it- its more then you will ever need. Plug this into your computer, create a word document and put all your passwords/ usernames together on document. If you have MS Word you can password protect this file. Then save the file to your jump drive and store it somewhere secure in your home, like a safe. If you have other important documents on your computer, like tax information or anything with your social security number, this would be a good practice as well. Since most computer’s are still accessible when not being used, there is a reasonable amount of danger leaving important information on that computers harddrive, unless you turn it off.

Digital piracy is the new craze for smart people who are too lazy to get a real job; however, if we take just a few simple precautions we can make sure we don’t get caught in the lifeboat without paddles.

Inspiration

I get up at 8AM, or at least I try to. I make it out the door around ten minutes until nine and I have about 3/4 a mile to walk to class. The chilly walk through the moist February air wakes my body up as I approach my class. I really wanted to sleep in on this particular day, but this day was different. We just concluded our section of the class focusing on the life and works of Gandhi, and today’s class is the segue to Dietrich Bonhoeffer and we’re discussing Matthew chapters 5-7, or more commonly known as the Sermon on the Mont.

The professor gives us all a few minutes to review the text as the majority of the class had not read it in preparation for the class. We begin to discuss the beatitudes and their meaning and I was taken aback by the responses I witnessed. The professor asked us “what do you think he means by ‘blessed’” as Christ opens each verse in chapter 5? Well its just a religious term, or it simply means god bless you. I’m thinking aren’t you not supposed to use the word you’re trying to define when defining a word?

One student interjects, “this is all subjective, you interpret the text to mean what you want it to and that’s it.” The teacher responds by pointing the student to the last verse of chapter five. “be perfect therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The student defends his claim that we cannot be perfect and that statement is subjective and should be taken lightly. The politically aware and active student smirks and makes comments beneath his breath as if he is above the use of scripture in the classroom; didn’t he say his Lutheranism was important to him? I’m personally unfamiliar with the Lutheran church, but as a sect of Christianity I’m sure the bible is included in their doctrine. 

The students came to a consensus that the bible is what you want it to be; you should highlight the important things. For instance, “Do not murder and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.” However, we should just ignore the “inapplicable” or unappealing parts so they do not interfere with our current worldview. For a class of fifteen students who all claimed to hold dear their faith in Christ on the first day of school this was amazingly contradictory.  We should remove that part about give to the poor, or adultery, remove homosexuality, and definitely remove that part about divorce, loving our enemies? How on earth can we do that? Love the terrorist in Iraq? We can’t do that, lets remove that from scripture. This class reinforced and represented faithfully one thing: American Christianity.

To the rest of the world, American is known as a Christian nation. However, the very faith that founded this country is being butchered, and removed from the country. We are Christians for convenience sake. Many of us go to church on Sunday, we tip the preacher for boring or entertaining us and we continue on with our day, unchanged. When an American reads the bible they take a knife to it as they read. Upon finding a verse that offends them they cut it out, when finding a verse that encourages them they highlight it. The American Christian bible would probably only be 1 cm thick if printed to the standards of the average Christian in this nation. The Sermon on the Mont, which is considered one of the most important parts of scripture in the bible, would consist of a handful of verses. Americans do not like to be told what to do and ignore or persecute those who tell them what to do.

To state it simply, America has become an existential, Christian ethics defying nation. The existential mind set is summarized: you follow whatever moral code makes you feel happy, and I’ll follow mine, and as long as no one steps on anyone’s toes everyone is happy. With this mindset there can be no absolute truth, everyone cannot be right. America believes in the existential way of thought as it supports the first amendment right to freedom of religion. By extension, if I think its OK to get a divorce I should be able to and still claim to be a Christian, or if I’m gay I can still be a Christian, if I want to steal, or rob someone, murder, it should still be OK and I am still a Christian if I want to go to Heaven when I die.

 

The simplistic truth that I am trying to address is that true and pure Christianity is not about religion–Christianity is not a religion. It’s about this personal and real relationship with Jesus. It’s so simplistic, but apparently difficult. When you’re in a relationship with someone you want to spend time with them, you listen to what they say, you consider them a friend, a father, a mother, a sibling, a lover. When you have a relationship with God, you also consider Him your Lord. When someone is your Lord, you’re their servant and you do what they say to insure they’re pleased with you. Many Americans relate to God like a middle school buddy, they listen to Him when He’s saying what they want to hear and ignore Him entirely the moment He says something that offends them–even disowning Him entirely when something is said that offends a choice or lifestyle they’ve embraced.

 

When I am speaking to people who do not relate to Christ, are agnostic, or of some other faith I do not quote scripture at them as it only pushes them further away; however, when I’m speaking to people who claim to adhere to this faith I believe scripture is necessary to edify and hold each other accountable, which is why I am brought to Luke chapter 9 right now.

 

It is red in my bible signifying the Son of Man, Jesus Christ Himself said these words “If you are ashamed of me and my words, I will be ashamed of you before my father, and the angels.”–Luke. 9:26 If we cut out Christ’s commandments that offend us because we’re ashamed of those words that convict us we are in turn ashamed of Christ, ashamed of God. In turn, Christ who is our intercessor before God will be ashamed of us before God and the angels! What does this mean of our salvation? What does this mean of our supposed relationship with Christ?

 

Many of us claim to follow Christ, but turn our back on him when its inconvenient or out of our way, but that is not what Christ has commanded of us. When you’re married you cannot just be unmarried for a day when you’re not feeling like it; likewise, you cannot just refrain from Christ when you’re a Christian. If you would call yourself Christ’s disciple, deny your self daily, take up your cross and follow Christ daily, –Luke. 9:23

 

By professing this faith in Christ we die to our selves and our carnal nature and are reborn as spiritual beings subservient to God and his commands. Many Americans claim to have had this spiritual enlightenment, but the Holy Spirit is void in their lives and they never died to their own carnal nature. Are these people really Christians? Only God can judge that, but scripture states that Christ sent the Holy Spirit to live in his Christians to set them apart from the world and if we don’t have that which sets apart from the world in this world, what will set us apart before God and the angels?

These are the events that inspired me to continue sharing my philosophical and theological thoughts with the world after about four years of refrain.

Tomorrow: Church is for the middle class

Blog orientation alteration

This blog’s original purpose was to be a workaround for my personal website. I wanted an RSS feed and a way to update that feed from my cell phone that would also be translated and updated automatically into html. This presented me with a bunch of problems as my web-host doesn’t support php, which is required to have an up to the minute updated feed. The solution I used was javascript, which worked, but was delayed and required third party intervention(using php). 

I’ve thought about it for a few weeks and I’ve decided to turn my blog into a philosophical waxing ground. Thus, that is what it will now become!

Site Delays

Trying to eliminate the flash presentation in the design section of my site; however, my class load is forcing me to put that on the back burner. Also, the writings page needs proofing and content addition, which is also being delayed. Until I can get those sections up, enjoy the flash content as it continues to increase as I continue to learn it.

January 2009

Its the beginning of a new year, and a new academic semester, which can be stressful for me.

I’ll be wrapping up the last few courses I need for my first major this semester.

My goal is to begin replacing the Design pages with more in-depth pages soon. This may be deterred by class, work, internship, the whole nine yards of obligations that I have!

Hope you have a great new year!

Wedding Photos

We finally got our wedding photos! For now they’re displayed on the wedding book page. It’s a little Christmas gift for my friends and family! Be blessed.

http://rmhollingsworth.com/design/book.html

Christmas Time

It’s Christmas time! I’ll be taking time off from work to visit family and such. Laptop is presently KIA; however, I’ll get that repaired when the heatsink arrives…

Merry Christmas!! It’s not the gifts that make the season, but the sacrifice it entails…

Welcome to the 5.5 experience!

The new visual layout is complete. A sleek, professional layout, which focuses on usability and navigation without forsaking aesthetics. Take a look around and have a great day!

Site revision version coming soon

Site version 5.5 to be out soon. Total visual rework of rmhollingsworh.com focusing on navigation and aesthetics. Just working out ie and firefox bugs.

Known Browser Issues

Despite any web designer’s best efforts, no web page is every perfect in any browser. The most issues I’ve encountered with rmhollingsworth.com thus far is with IE 6.

• png files don’t display correctly: transparency doesn’t work and a white background is displayed instead of transparent background
• minor CSS issues

The quicktime movies control bar isn’t showing up in any browser on my PC, running Vista works on every browser on my Mac and XP so we’ll try to identify that asap

pretty small laundry list for the first 2 weeks