by Richard Romando

All passwords should be changed regularly. A change in password could also be necessitated by the fear or reality of a user’s current password being compromised. As a precautionary measure, any system should provide an encrypted method for changing a password. If a new password is passed to the system in an unencrypted form, security can be compromised before the new password can even be installed in the password database. And if a compromised employee or other intermediary gets hold of the new password, there is little to gain from changing a password. There are some web sites that include the user-selected password in an unencrypted confirming e-mail message.

Today, automatic issuance of replacements for lost passwords is mostly done with the help of identity management systems. To verify the user’s identity, questions are asked and answers are compared with the ones previously stored. Some samples: “Where were you born?” or “What is your favorite soccer club?” or “Who is your favorite actress?” There is a possibility that in a number of such cases the answers to these questions can be guessed, found by research, or determined with the help of social engineering. Although many users have now learnt not to reveal a password, there are a few as well who consider the name of their favorite soccer team to need similar care.
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by Richard Romando

Passwords have been in use for different purposes over a long period of time. We are aware that in earlier times, sentries would not allow anyone inside a location if he failed to say the password. Today, we have to use passwords in different steps of our life. They are now used to control access to protected computer operating systems, mobile phones, ATMs, cable TV decoders, and a great many other applications. One who uses a computer on a regular basis has to use passwords for a number of purposes, like retrieving e-mail from servers, logins to computer accounts, accessing databases, networks, and web sites. You may even require a password if you want to read your newspaper online.
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by Matt Peterson

There are several services available now that allow you to remotely access your computer from any other machine in the world, as long as it is connected to the internet. The good news is that Windows XP Professional has this functionality built into the operating system. In this article, I am going to show you how to configure your Windows XP Professional computer to support remote access using the Remote Desktop feature.
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