Tag Archives: Security

Stop Password Expiration In Windows 7

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My brother has just brought me his laptop to look at after forgetting the login password. It was frequently asking him to change the password, and one day he changed it and then forgot it. I found a simple command to stop the password from expiring:

First run Cmd (Command Line) as Administrator (click Start -> and type cmd. Right click on Cmd and choose “Run As Administrator”). If you followed correctly this should give you a black command line window with white text.

Then type:

net accounts /maxpwage:unlimited

And press return or enter.

It should congratulate you, or say successful (can’t remember the exact wording).

The password should then last forever, or until it is changed manually.

Note: It is good practice to change passwords regularly, however outside of corporate IT land can be a huge hassle. Just ask my brother :-)  

Data Destruction Discussion On Slashdot

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Slashdot had an interesting article today about how to destroy hard drives. It’s a commonly asked question, but deserves a bit of time every once in a while. Of course there are the usual physical destruction options, from the humble hammer and screwdriver, to more exotic (and dangerous) techniques like a propane furnace.

For most purposes we still advise that a simple zeroing of the whole disk is a pretty safe bet. *

Failing that, then as long as you totally destroy the platters, you are good to go. That means taking the disk apart and grinding, bending and scraping the disks to bits.

* During normal use, a hard drive will get occasional bad sectors, which are then mapped out and prevented from being used. When that same sector is requested again, a new spare sector is used from another part of the disk. With the right knowledge, it is possible to access this list of remapped / bad sectors and see if there is any useful data within them. The chances of finding anything useful in these sectors is slim, but you never know.

Read the article on Slashdot

SSDs Not Secure

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Some tests carried out by the “Non-Volatile Systems Laboratory” have revealed some serious flaws with SSDs ability to be securely erased. When using standard tools designed for spinning disks, the results were understandably bad. They also tried the built-in “Security Erase Unit” command and the results of this were generally not good. After being securely erased, most of the SSDs still contained some large fragments of the test files.

Some secure erasure software would be similarly inefficient for hard disks anyway, as things like remapped or bad sectors can still contain readable data which may not be erased during the process.

The simplest solution for securely erasing any data is to completely destroy the storage media. For hard drives this means making a real mess of the platters, for SSDs it means wrecking the whole PCB, data chips and controller chips.

Read More On Slashdot

PGP vs 10.6.5 Don’t Update

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PGP 10.6.5 Don't Update

PGP 10.6.5 Don't Update

Users of PGP Whole Disk Encryption for Mac are advised agains the recent system update to Snow Leopard 10.6.5. Reports of users getting stuck in a reboot loop after the update have been appearing on PGP forums. The official advice is to first decrypt, then install the update, then encrypt again. More details of this can be found on Threatpost, with links for people that have already performed the update and are now locked out of their systems.

Safari Mac Bug

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Safari Mac Users need to disable Autofill within preferences. Apples browser defaults autofill to allow malicious websites access to your details from your address book without consent. This can potentially be used for identification fraud.

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