Lessons learned today: Buy authenticator

[zenga]

It's a contradiction in terminis when people that use windows as their operating system talk about taking security measures. Moving away from windows is the best security upgrade you can make.

I don't frequent porn sites or any non-safe site.

My "visit" list includes

...
wow forums
shoryuken
deviantart
warcraftmovies
elitist jerks
arenajunkies
mmo-champion
...

I don't think i need an authenticator. I will eventually get one though. My password includes letters, numbers, ascii characters and is the max character length. It would take most brute-force years to get in.

MMO champ got hacked just a couple of weeks ago. Basically a virus searches for FTP logins on ones computer, then edits web files on the ftp server with javascript, and whenever that file (ie. website) is being accessed, the javascript tries to run an applet that installs the virus on the machine of the visitor. And besides reproducing itself such a virus could install other nasty stuff as well.

Same story with the flash exploit where 'legit' sites that run flash based ads have infected users beyond their knowledge.

My point being: trusting the website owners might give you a false 'im safe' feeling. There are other things you can do on your side to minimize troubles (disable java applets, flash, ...)

[Souca]

Another thing to keep in mind, while they can log in with your auth code if they do a man in the middle attack, they can NOT remove your auth without having physical access it to read the serial number printed on the back of it. While they do get one log in with this method, once you request the password be reset (even if they have changed it), they no longer have access until they steal your code in real-time again.

This pattern will set off alarms very quickly and the account will get locked. It's all a matter of degrees of safety. Without an auth, they will get your account, put an auth on it, and then YOU MUST PROVE IT IS YOUR ACCOUNT while they ransack it. With an auth, they mere get your login session, not your account. When you call in, if you can give the phone techs an authenticator code, things go much quicker.

In summary, having an auth makes the hacker's job so much harder and your job of recovery that much easier. Add up the time you will spend getting everything back after a hack and divide it by 10 seconds; that's how many logins you have to make between hacks for it to be quicker to not have an auth in the long run. It took about a week to get everything back on my one hacked account, and that was fast.

Go here and save yourself a week or more.

- Souca -