Saturday, February 28, 2015
Friday, February 27, 2015
Multi-User Password Manager
Multi-user password manager is a lubricant for your business effective administrations which allows easy access to corporate accounts with all the account passwords stored in a secure multi-user password database. This is the most effective way of password management in an organization which allows your company employees to login to corporate accounts much faster with almost no effort. The multi-user password manager has the following functionalities.
o Multi-user password database
o Access to all corporate accounts with one password
o Access to the password database with administrator rights
o Access to the password database with the user rights
o Automatic account login without knowing account password
o No need to type logins and passwords
o No need to remember passwords
This allows you to implement the most effective password management strategy within your corporate infrastructure while preserving maximum security of your accounts.
How it works
The administrator creates a password database which stores information about all corporate accounts including logins and passwords. Now the administrator can create multi-user account which allows multiple users to access the password database. To enable your employees to access all corporate accounts without having to remember and type passwords, slip them the multi-user password and see how much quicker your business will run!
With the multi-user password, your employees will be able to access corporate accounts without knowing account passwords because the program logs them into accounts automatically without having to type passwords and logins.
With one multi-user password, you don't have to change each of your account passwords every so often to stay secure. You just have to change one multi-user password which grants access to the password database. Thus you attain a multi-level protection for all your corporate accounts. This means that each account is protected with its own password, plus the account database is itself password protected.
So what advantages does multi-user password manager bring to your company?
1) Instant access to company accounts for all employees
2) No information leaks (only the administrator knows account passwords)
3) Automatic access to newly added accounts by all employees (no need to send emails)
4) No employee complaints such as 'I forgot my password'
Find more information on multi-user password manager
Alexander Golishev is a copywriter for Novosoft LLC, software developer.
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Password Managing Software. How to Save Time and Effort ...
by: Edwin Jones
Password Managers are software that store passwords for you on your computer. Password Managers are essential due to the amount of confidential information each individual has.
Software
Password Manager Software stores passwords, user ids, activation codes and more. All the passwords are in one place, stored safely and securely. Good password managers use encryption algorithms certified by the US Department of Defence. All you have to remember is a single password for the Password Manager Software.
Password management software can make your life a lot easier and save time. Also the best Password Managing Software offer incredibly convenient form completion. No more laborious filling in of your personal information and card details.
Information
Password Managers are dedicated software programs that secure your passwords and other data, yet give you an easily accessible repository for the information when you need it. The program monitors your Web surfing and offers to save any name and password information you enter at a site. Like your passwords, this information is encrypted and accessible from a master password, which is cached in memory so you need enter it only once per session.
With multitudes of websites with your login information and subscriptions, Password Managers takes the drudgery out of filling forms and logging in. There are many Password Manager Programs available. Many are free to try and free for a small number of saved logins. Cost for unlimited use is small, often less than $30. Check out a Review Site such as that mentioned at the end of this article to see details of the best Programs
Conclusion
Password managers are a huge help in dealing with our exponentially growing numbers of accounts. Password Managers are the new essential for any Internet user. On the other hand the basic browser form fillers and login savers are neither safe nor secure.
Edwin Jones is a writer on Computer and Internet use. His latest Website gives detailed reviews on the best Password Management Software. You can view there the choices of password management software for Desktop, Mobile and Internet Systems. Go to http://password-manager-reviews.com
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Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Tuesday, February 24, 2015
Firefox Just Got Better by Burk Pendergrass - ArticleCity.com
by: Burk Pendergrass
The safest most secure app for browsing the internet currently available just got better and has more improvements on the way. Are you ready for the latest Mozilla release? Firefox 3 Beta 4 is available for download, but before you go running off like some half cocked Microsoft groupie notice the "beta" tag.
Hello!! The internet is a dangerous place. The Remote Helpdesk 1 Team continues to be amused (we can no longer say amazed) at people who would not dare to venture into certain parts of a city but who seemingly rush into the internet's dark corners and dimly lighted streets ill prepared.
Before you sail into a storm baton down the hatches, and before you cruise into hacker, virus, trojan, and criminally infested areas of the world wide web at least darken the windows and arm yourself. Not to take appropriate precautions will assure your computer a visit to the infectious disease controls center if not the hard drive morgue.
Firefox developers have thus far proven themselves to the best at incorporating necessary safety features into their browser while preserving user options and cruise speeds. Online PC Repair folks feel they owe a lot of their success to getting their loyal users involved in the development and testing process. These folks, like The Tennessee Mountain Man, have helped keep the programs on track and the applications minimal. For instance, if a client wants twenty-five cents - give him a quarter like Mozilla tends to do rather that twenty-five pennies as Microsoft is famous for.
It takes a lot less resources to process one coin than it does to count twenty-five. Mozilla recognizing this has given the new "beta" release a lot of new features and improved compatibility while freeing up resources. The end result being a more nimble and faster overall browsing experience. At the same time they have enhanced Firefox's security.
Released to the public via the Mozilla website Monday, 10 March 2008, Firefox 3 Beta 4 is in the beta stage of any software's life cycle. Firefox 3 Beta 4 loudly proclaims that it is "for testing purposes only" therefore it is not for everyone. It you are a newbie or maybe even an intermediate internet user, the suggestion of the Computer Man would be that you use Firefox 2.0.0.12, the latest most stable full release until Firefox 3 is out of beta.
If you just can't wait for a better browsing experience Mozilla reports "the new release includes more than 900 enhancements from beta 3, including drastic improvements to performance and memory usage, as well as fixes for stability, platform enhancements and user interface".
But that is not the half of it... not by a long shot. "Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 31 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 12,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers improvements.", according to Mozilla.
Enhancements like these reported on the Mozilla website:
"More Secure
* One-click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if your connection is protected from eavesdropping. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site favicon button will turn green and show the name of the company you're connected to. (Try it here!)
* Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware. (Try it here!)
* New Web Forgery Protection page: the content of pages suspected as web forgeries is no longer shown. (Try it here!)
* New SSL error pages: clearer and stricter error pages are used when Firefox encounters an invalid SSL certificate. (Try it here!)
* Add-ons and Plugin version check: Firefox now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and will disable older, insecure versions.
* Secure add-on updates: to improve add-on update security, add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will be disabled.
* Anti-virus integration: Firefox will inform anti-virus software when downloading executables.
* Vista Parental Controls: Firefox now respects the Vista system-wide parental control setting for disabling file downloads.
* Effective top-level domain (eTLD) service better restricts cookies and other restricted content to a single domain.
* Better protection against cross-site JSON data leaks.
Easier to Use
* Easier password management: an information bar replaces the old password dialog so you can now save passwords after a successful login.
* Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.
* [Improved in Beta 4!] New Download Manager: the revised download manager makes it much easier to locate downloaded files, and you can see and search on the name of the website where a file came from. Your active downloads and time remaining are always shown in the status bar as your files download.
* Resumable downloading: users can now resume downloads after restarting the browser or resetting your network connection.
* [Improved in Beta 4!] Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site.
* Podcasts and Videocasts can be associated with your media playback tools.
* Tab scrolling and quickmenu: tabs are easier to locate with the new tab scrolling and tab quickmenu.
* Save what you were doing: Firefox will prompt users to save tabs on exit.
* Optimized Open in Tabs behavior: opening a folder of bookmarks in tabs now appends the new tabs rather than overwriting.
* Location and Search bar size can now be customized with a simple resizer item.
* Text selection improvements: multiple text selections can be made with Ctrl/Cmd; double-click drag selects in "word-by-word" mode; triple-clicking selects a paragraph.
* Find toolbar: the Find toolbar now opens with the current selection.
* Plugin management: users can disable individual plugins in the Add-on Manager.
* [Improved in Beta 4!] Integration with Vista: Firefox now has Vista-specific icons, and uses native user interface widgets in the browser and in web forms.
* [Improved in Beta 4!] Integration with the Mac: the new Firefox theme makes toolbars, icons, and other user interface elements look like a native OS X application. Firefox also uses OS X widgets and spell-checker in web forms and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates. A combined back and forward control make it even easier to move between web pages.
* [Improved in Beta 4!] Integration with Linux: Firefox's default icons, buttons, and menu styles now use the native GTK theme.
More Personal
* Star button: quickly add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click; a second click lets you file and tag them.
* Tags: associate keywords with your bookmarks to sort them by topic.
* [Improved in Beta 4!] Location bar & auto-complete: type in all or part of the title, tag or address of a page to see a list of matches from your history and bookmarks; a new display makes it easier to scan through the matching results and find that page you're looking for. Results are returned according to their frecency (a combination of frequency and recency of visits to that page) ensuring that you're seeing the most relevant matches. An adaptive learning algorithm further tunes the results to your patterns!
* Smart Bookmarks Folder: quickly access your recently bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as your more frequently visited pages with the new smart bookmarks folder on your bookmark toolbar.
* Places Organizer: view, organize and search through all of your bookmarks, tags, and browsing history with multiple views and smart folders to store your frequent searches.
* Web-based protocol handlers: web applications, such as your favorite webmail provider, can now be used instead of desktop applications for handling mailto: links from other sites. Similar support is available for other protocols (Web applications will have to first enable this by registering as handlers with Firefox).
* Download & Install Add-ons: the Add-ons Manager (Tools > Add-ons) can now be used to download and install a Firefox customization from the thousands of Add-ons available from our community add-ons website. When you first open the Add-ons Manager, a list of recommended Add-ons is shown.
* Easy to use Download Actions: a new Applications preferences pane provides a better UI for configuring handlers for various file types and protocol schemes.
Improved Platform for Developers
* New graphics and font handling: new graphics and text rendering architectures in Gecko 1.9 provides rendering improvements in CSS, SVG as well as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts.
* Color management: (set gfx.color_management.enabled on in about:config and restart the browser to enable.) Firefox can now adjust images with embedded color profiles.
* Offline support: enables web applications to provide offline functionality (website authors must add support for offline
browsing to their site for this feature to be available to users).
* A more complete overview of Firefox 3 for developers is available for website and add-on developers.
Improved Performance
* [Improved in Beta 4!] Speed: improvements to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimizations have resulted in significant improvements in performance. Compared to Firefox 2, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run twice as fast in Firefox 3 Beta 4, and the popular SunSpider test from Apple shows improvements over previous releases.
* [Improved in Beta 4!] Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 Beta 4 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned.
* Reliability: A user's bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences are now stored in a transactionally secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes."
Mozilla provides Firefox 3 Beta 4 for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X in forty different languages, and reports it can be removed without losing your bookmarks, web browsing history, extensions and other add-ons. Best of all - it is FREE ! Just download, install, and enjoy a whole new faster browsing experience if your computer meets one of the following system requirements.
Windows
Operating Systems
* Windows 2000
* Windows XP
* Windows Server 2003
* Windows Vista
Minimum Hardware
* Pentium 233 MHz (Recommended: Pentium 500MHz or greater)
* 64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater)
* 52 MB hard drive space
Mac
Operating Systems
* Mac OS X 10.4 and later
Minimum Hardware
* Macintosh computer with an Intel x86 or PowerPC G3, G4, or G5 processor
* 128 MB RAM (Recommended: 256 MB RAM or greater)
* 200 MB hard drive space
Linux
Software Requirements
Please note that Linux distributors may provide packages for your distribution which have different requirements.
* Linux kernel - 2.2.14 or higher with the following libraries or packages:
o glibc 2.3.2 or higher
o XFree86-3.3.6 or higher
o gtk+2.0 or higher
o fontconfig (also known as xft)
o libstdc++5
Minimum Hardware
* Intel Pentium II or AMD K6-III+ 233 MHz CPU (Recommended: 500MHz or greater)
* 64 MB RAM (Recommended: 128 MB RAM or greater)
* 52 MB hard drive space
And, if you still have not tried Mozilla Thunderbird,
get ready to kick Outlook Express to the curb!
Publication of Burk Pendergrass, J.D., a Cherokee Indian and Viet Nam Vet specializing in website design at http://computermanwebsitedesign.bravehost.com/ and http://remotehelpdesk1.com/ specializing in online web based computer repair.
Monday, February 23, 2015
Oracle 11G's Strong Verifier and Case Sensitive Password ...
by: Paul Fleming
As an Oracle DBA, you probably have heard a lot about the new security features in Oracle 11G such as database vault, audit vault, strong verifier, enhanced ASO, etc. But with a busy schedule, how do you find the time to study all the topics in depth? Are all of them going to affect your daily DBA operations? What should you know first and foremost? Of course, depending on the particular database you are administering, you will have your unique need. But as a rule of thumb, what tends to affect you the most is almost never those cool new features. The reason is simple: if you don't use them, they won't affect you. What tends to affect you is the change in the existing features that might lead to compatibility or interoperability issues. When that script you have used for years suddenly stops working, you will be disappointed. When your boss or above calls to ask what happened, you could feel terrible.
In this article, we discuss the new password case sensitivity feature in 11G. Every Oracle session starts with authentication. If the authentication fails at the beginning of your script, everything that follows will almost certainly be broken. So what was changed, why, and what should you know?
A Primer on Verifier
I'll start with a primer on password verifier. As you probably know, for security reasons, Oracle user's passwords are never stored as clear text. Instead, they are stored as a "verifier", a one-way hash value calculated from the clear text password. Hash verifier has a few unique features. One, it is "one-way": It is easy to calculate the hash value from a clear text password, but it is nearly impossible to figure out the clear text password from a hash value. Two, different clear texts almost never yield the same hash value (called collision). These features allow Oracle database to store the hash value of a user's password as a surrogate for the clear text password. When a user provides a password to logon, Oracle calculates the hash value from that password, and allows the user to logon if it matches the hash value that is stored in the database. To get a feel what an Oracle verifier looks like, take a look at the PASSWORD column in the user$ table in SYS schema (of course, you will need SYSDBA privilege to do that).
SELECT NAME,PASSWORD FROM SYS.USER$ ORDER BY NAME;
What Was Changed
Prior to 11G, Oracle passwords were case insensitive. "foobar", "FOOBAR", and "FoOBaR" are identical when used as an Oracle password. They yield the same hash value. If a user could log in with password "foobar", he could log in with "FOOBAR" as well. In 11G, however, when you create or modify user accounts, by default passwords are case sensitive. 11G also introduces a "salt" in the hash value generation so that even two users have identical passwords, their verifiers would still be different.
Oracle allows to you to control password case sensitivity for backward compatibility by setting the SEC_CASE_SENSITIVE_LOGON initialization parameter. Only users who have the ALTER SYSTEM privilege can set the SEC_CASE_SENSITIVE_LOGON parameter. Set it to TRUE to enable case sensitivity or FALSE to disable case sensitivity.
ALTER SYSTEM SET SEC_CASE_SENSITIVE_LOGON = TRUE | FALSE;
How Case Sensitivity Affects Password Files
As you may remember, Oracle stores the passwords (again in the form of verifiers) of users with SYSDBA and SYSOPER privileges in a "password file" on the server, rather than in the database. You can enable or disable case sensitivity for password files by using the ignorecase argument in the ORAPWD command line utility. The default value for ignorecase is n (no), which enforces case sensitivity.
Here is an example of how to enable password case sensitivity for SYSDBA and SYSOPER users
orapwd file=orapw entries=100 ignorecase=n
Enter password for SYS: password
This creates a password file called orapwd. Since ignorecase is set to n (no), the password entered for the password parameter will be case sensitive. Afterwards, if you connect using this password, it succeeds(as long as you enter the password using the exact same characters with the exact same case as created). If you enter the same password with different case, it will fail
If you, the DBA, sets the system to ignorecase to y, then the passwords in the password file are case insensitive, and this means that you can enter the password using any capitalization that you want.
It is important to note that given the way it is controlled, within one Oracle system, the password's case sensitivity of a regular user and a SYSDBA/SYSOPER user can be independent.
How Password Case Sensitivity Affects Import and Upgrade
What happens when you export some users from a previous database where the password is case insensitive into 11G? The case-insensitive passwords in these accounts remain case insensitive, even if the 11G system has turned on password case sensitivity. This makes sense because otherwise old users may not be able to log on from a previously working script or client program. This, however, will change when the user changes his or her password.
You can find users who have case sensitive or case insensitive passwords by querying the DBA_USERS view. The PASSWORD_VERSIONS column in this view indicates the release in which the password was created. For example:
SELECT USERNAME, PASSWORD_VERSIONS FROM DBA_USERS;
USERNAME PASSWORD_VERSIONS
------------------------------ -----------------
JONES 10G 11G
ADAMS 10G 11G
CLARK 10G 11G
PRESTON 11G
BLAKE 10G
The passwords for accounts jones, adams, and clark were originally created in Release 10g and then reset in Release 11g. Their passwords, assuming case sensitivity has been enabled, are now case sensitive, as is the password for preston. However, the account for blake is still using the Release 10g standard, so it is case insensitive. Once he changes his password, it will become case sensitive and more secure.
Conclusion
Users' passwords in Oracle 11G database become case sensitive by default. Regular user and SYSDBA/SYSOPER user's password case sensitivity can be controlled independently. If you have a script with inconsistent password cases, the script may stop working with 11G even though it works fine with previous releases. To learn more about this topic, read "Security Guide" (Oracle Part Number B28531-03).
Peter Dwyer is an internationally known System and Database Architect for Oracle environments. He is founding principal of The Certainty Group (http://www.certaintygroup.com), a Boston-based Oracle database consultation company specializing in quickly assessing and correcting complex problems in multi-vendor, mission-critical systems that demand high performance and reliability.
Sunday, February 22, 2015
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Friday, February 20, 2015
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