password

Security firm Symantec on Friday released results of a survey on password management that showed 63 percent of respondents don't change their passwords very often, 45 percent use a few passwords that they alternate for all accounts, and some 10 percent don't change their passwords at all.

These are a startling numbers as, according to the survey, 44 percent of respondents said they have more than 20 accounts that require a password.

Worst of all, the survey also found that about 10 percent of respondents have used their pet's name as a password. This is as bad … Read more

If you get an e-mail that appears to be from Facebook saying the company reset your password and urging you to open an attachment, it is a scam. Repeat, it is a scam.

McAfee warned people in a blog post on Wednesday to beware of an e-mail that appears to come from Facebook urging recipients to open an attachment to get their new password.

The attachment contains a password stealer that targets Windows computers and which can potentially access any username and password combination used on the computer, not just the login credentials for Facebook.

"This threat is potentially … Read more

Form Auto Fill provides a great tool for saving time when filling out repetitive fields online. Though its functionality ultimately won out, it took a little head-scratching to navigate a few bumps in the road.

Form Auto Fill's interface is stark and feels intuitive at first. However, after a few minutes of unsuccessfully setting up our autofill options, things were obviously more complicated than we'd imagined. Luckily, the step-by-step Help file leads users through the operational basics. The program is actually pretty simple to use: a hot-key combination records all fillable fields on a Web site. It creates … Read more

Twitter has revealed the back story on why it reset passwords this week for many of its users.

The phishing attacks that forced Twitter to change account passwords stemmed from discovery of a scam being run by a torrent Web site creator, explained Del Harvey, Twitter's director of trust and safety, in a blog post Tuesday evening.

Twitter had found that someone for the past few years had been building torrent sites and forums requiring a log-in and password. This person then sold these Web sites and forums to people interested in starting their own torrent download sites.

Unknown … Read more

There are several excellent bookmark-syncing extensions for Firefox, but Weave is the first major effort designed by Mozilla. The newest version of Weave is out of beta and supports more than just bookmark sync. It also supports syncing open tabs, history, passwords, preferences, and Firefox 3's advanced Location Bar data.

The add-on lives in your tools menu, in your Options menu, and in a Status Bar icon. From clicking on any of them, you can check your syncing log, create a user account and password, and toggle sync settings. The default is to sync all, but choosing the customization … Read more

Anyone who's ever tried to open or edit an important Microsoft Word or Excel document, only to find it's protected by a long-lost or never-known password, will appreciate PasswordUnlocker's Office Password Unlocker. It's a handy tool that unlocks password-protected Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access documents so they can be opened and edited by anyone. You can also use it to recover forgotten Office passwords. It's compatible with all versions of Microsoft Office from 97 to 2007.

Office Password Unlocker opens with a basic gray dialog box typical of the Office family, which means functional but … Read more

In a world where almost everything is online, from e-mail to credit cards, social networking to car insurance, keeping passwords both secure and manageable is no easy task. Security experts recommend that you not use the same password for everything, and that you incorporate a mix of letters, numbers, and punctuation. Who can remember so many different nonsensical passwords? Fortunately, there's Efficient Password Manager, a simple and effective way to keep track of passwords for just about everything.

The program's interface is plain and intuitive, reminding us a bit of Microsoft Outlook. There are separate sections in which … Read more

KeePass Password Safe Professional provides a helpful directory for remembering passwords and keeping them secure. While its layout was slightly confusing, its excellent results made us very happy, and to top it off, it's free.

The program's interface has a stark, directionless layout that initially turned us off. However, a visit to the Help file's instructions and some experimenting quickly opened this program up, and it actually proved to be easy to use. The program's functionality is quite simple: Follow an onscreen menu to enter a Web site's information and its corresponding user name and … Read more

Since Apple introduced iTunes 9 several months ago, we've received a fair number of complaints about two particular bugs. So far no one, not even the first and second levels of Applecare support, has been able to resolve them.

iTunes password-saving problem

Previous versions of iTunes allowed you to save your iTunes Store password on your desktop by checking the box as shown in the adjacent picture. Now, iTunes 9 teases us with a dialog box offering this option, but when you attempt to save the password by checking the box, iTunes fails to remember the password. Although there … Read more