Re: Passwords & Passphrases

[Mike Porter <mike () UDEL EDU>]

On Mon, 19 Nov 2007, Mike Iglesias wrote:

> Bob Bayn wrote:
> > What finally prompted us to get off our "any 4 or more characters"
> > butts was dictionary attacks that were hitting our proxy server
> > and VPN server from Chinese IP addresses.  Once past our firewall
> > through proxy or VPN they are able to snoop our network from inside
> > probing machines undetected,  and do unappreciated things like
> > download subscription databases from the library until the provider
> > got suspicious of the traffic.
>
> We see some of this too, but I'm pretty sure most of logins from China are
> using passwords captured by keyloggers, not password guessing.  There's no
> pattern of repeated login attempts to the accounts used - they just log in,
> log out, and move on to the next account/password.

We've been seeing this too.  One possible way the passwords are
being captured is people running unencrypted protocols over their
cable modem from home.

In our case, the connections are usually from an outfit using an
Irael based network provider.

Mike