1.1 How evil-doers access your accounts

First and foremost, because people give them their credentials (user name and password). Not deliberately, of course. They leave them around or reply to a phishing scam or whatever. There’s nothing providers of security assistance can do about it. That’s the user’s responsibility. Be careful out there. Keep your systems clean of spyware and watch for phishers.

The next most common method is for a site to get “hacked” and the crooks make off with password files. Hopefully, they’ve been hash encoded, but they are sometimes in the clear. If they are hashed, then the crackers will try to reverse the hash and see how far and wide they can use your credentials.

Other possibilities are telescopes, line taps, wireless sniffing and so on. Unless you are a secret agent working on national security matters, these possibilities are not terribly likely possibilities.

The purpose of this software is to render useless, limit the potential damage, or, at least, make it difficult to gain much use out of any information captured. And, also, make it convenient enough to use that it is actually used. A very secure password scheme that is a nuisance to use, won’t be used, and is therefore not very useful.

This document was generated by Bruce Korb on June 30, 2018 using texi2html 1.82.