To authenticate to a website, you need to provide a username and password. The site then checks the authentication details that you have provided by comparing them with the details it has stored in its database. If the details match, access is granted. If the details don’t match, access is denied. Unfortunately, data breaches are a relatively common occurrence. Data breaches … [Read more...] about What is a Dictionary Attack?
Posts About Hardware
What is a Blacklist?
A blacklist is a list of one form of entity or another that the list’s curator has determined to be unwanted. The list is then used to actively restrict the listed entities in one form or another depending on the specific use case. Blacklists may be extremely specific against particular individuals, or software programs for example. Alternatively, they can also be quite general … [Read more...] about What is a Blacklist?
What is a Honeypot?
If you connect a computer to the open Internet without any sort of inbound traffic filter, it will typically start receiving attack traffic within minutes. Such is the scale of automated attacks and scanning constantly happening on the Internet. The vast majority of this sort of traffic is completely automated. It’s just bots scanning the Internet and maybe trying some random … [Read more...] about What is a Honeypot?
What is a Cryptographic Hash?
The basics of encryption algorithms are fairly easy to understand. An input or plaintext is taken along with a key and processed by the algorithm. The output is encrypted and known as the ciphertext. A critical part of an encryption algorithm though is that you can reverse the process. If you have a ciphertext and the decryption key, you can run the algorithm again and get the … [Read more...] about What is a Cryptographic Hash?
What is Account Harvesting?
There are many different types of data breaches. Some involve huge amounts of time, planning, and effort on the attacker’s part. This can take the form of learning how a system works before crafting a convincing phishing message and sending it to an employee that has enough access to allow the attacker to steal sensitive details. This sort of attack can result in a huge amount … [Read more...] about What is Account Harvesting?
What Is a Breach?
It's pretty common nowadays to hear about a new data breach. There are plenty of different forms a data breach can take, though. There are even breaches that don't result in data breaches at all. The core of a data breach is that some data intended to remain private is made public. … [Read more...] about What Is a Breach?
What Is Quantum Cryptography?
Quantum cryptography refers to cryptographic systems that rely on quantum mechanical effects and properties to perform cryptographic tasks. This is in contrast to classical cryptography used on modern computers. A fundamental requirement of quantum cryptography is the use of a quantum computer; it cannot be performed using a standard computer. … [Read more...] about What Is Quantum Cryptography?
What is Clock Gating?
Clock speed is all important to CPU performance. At least, that’s what the marketing department in companies that design and sell CPUs would like you to think. Of course, there are many other factors and the weighting of all of them depends on your use case. A lightly threaded video game will typically benefit from one lighting fast core, backed up by a few slower cores. A … [Read more...] about What is Clock Gating?
What Is Asymmetric Encryption?
There are a lot of different parts of cryptography. If you want to encrypt some data, though, there are two types of algorithms you can use: symmetric encryption algorithms and asymmetric encryption algorithms. The concept is the same: they can encrypt data but work on different principles and have other use cases. … [Read more...] about What Is Asymmetric Encryption?
What is an SoC?
If you’ve ever looked inside a PC tower you can see that there are a lot of different components. Your average laptop contains most of the same components but shrinks them down, reformats them, and cuts out as much “wasted” space as possible. A smartphone can do the same things as a desktop or laptop computer, though admittedly, not as quickly. It does so because it contains … [Read more...] about What is an SoC?