Kevin Beaver

To cyber-protect your personal and business data, make sure everyone at home and at work recognizes that they are a target.People who believe that hackers want to breach their computers and phones and that cyber criminals want to steal their data act differently than people who do not understand the true nature of the threat.

Hackers use a variety of means to gain passwords. One of the most common ways for hackers to get access to your passwords is through social engineering, but they don’t stop there. Check out the following tools and vulnerabilities hackers exploit to grab your password. Keystroke logging One of the best techniques for capturing passwords is remote keystroke logging — the use of software or hardware to record keystrokes as they’re typed.

Not all hacking is bad. It reveals security weaknesses or flaws in your computing setups. This Cheat Sheet provides you with quick references to tools and tips and alerts you to commonly hacked targets — information you need to make your security testing efforts easier.Hacking tools you can’t live withoutAs an IT information security professional, your toolkit is the most critical item you can possess against hacking — other than hands-on experience and common sense.

Websites and applications are notorious for taking practically any type of input, mistakenly assuming that it’s valid, and processing it further. Not validating input is one of the greatest mistakes that web developers can make and one of the finest tools in a hackers toolkit.Several attacks that insert malformed data — often, too much at one time — can be run against a website or application, which can confuse the system and make it divulge too much information to the hacker.

As with practically any IT or security project, you need to plan security testing. And, since it's been said that action without planning is the root of every failure, strategic and tactical issues in vulnerability and penetration testing need to be determined and agreed on in advance.To ensure the success of your ethical hacking efforts, spend time planning for any amount of testing, from a simple OS password-cracking test against a few servers to a penetration test of a complex web environment.

As part of mapping out your network before performing security testing or an ethical hack, you can search public databases and resources to see what other people know about your systems. WHOIS lookups The best starting point is to perform a WHOIS lookup by using any one of the tools available on the internet. In case you're not familiar, WHOIS is a protocol you can use to query online databases such as DNS registries to learn more about domain names and IP address blocks.

Although it’s not usually top of mind, people send a ton of good info via email that a hacker can use. Knowing this, you will want to ensure that your email systems are probably warded against hackers. The following countermeasures help keep messages as secure as possible to avoid an email hack. Software solutions that combat email hacking The right software can neutralize many threats against your email system: Use antimalware software on the email server — better, the email gateway — to prevent malware from reaching email clients.