Techno Glob

Security breaches and password leaks happen constantly on today’s Internet. LinkedIn, Yahoo, Last.fm, eHarmony – the list of compromised websites is long. If you want to know whether your account information was leaked, there are some tools you can use.

These leaks often lead to many compromised accounts on other websites. However, you can protect yourself by using unique passwords everywhere – if you do, password leaks won’t be a threat to you.

Image Credit: Johan Larsson on Flickr

Password leaks are so dangerous because many people use the same password for multiple websites. If you register for a website with your email address and provide the same password you use for your email account, that email/password combination may be present on a list somewhere.

Crackers can then use this email/password combination to gain access to your email account. Even if you use a different password for your email account, they may try the email or account name and password combination on other websites to gain access to your other accounts.

For example, crackers recently compromised over 11,000 Guild Wars 2 accounts. They didn’t use keyloggers or compromise the game’s servers – they just tried logging in using email address and password combinations found on lists of leaked passwords. Players who reused a password that had already been leaked were compromised. The same will happen for other services that crackers want to gain access to.

To protect yourself against future leaks, ensure you use different passwords on each website – and ensure they’re long, strong passwords. Otherwise, a compromise at one website could lead to your accounts elsewhere being compromised. While compromised websites will generally inform you of the leak and have you change your password immediately, this won’t help much if you’re using the same password on many other websites.

Remembering unique passwords for all the different websites we use can be difficult, which is why password managers can be so useful. We like LastPass, but many people swear byKeePass, which keeps you in control of your data.

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If you’re curious whether your email address appears on one of these leaked password lists, you don’t have to find a shady download site and download the lists yourself. Instead, you can use a tool that quickly checks for you.

PwnedList is a good one. LastPass now uses PwnedList to monitor whether LastPass account email addresses become compromised. For example, if your LastPass account email address is you@example.com, you’ll get a notification if you@example.com appears on any lists of leaked email addresses and passwords. This only applies to the single email address you use for your LastPass account, not every address you have in your LastPass vault.

If you want to check an email address manually, you can use PwnedList’s website. Plug in an email address and PwnedList will tell you whether it appears on any leaked lists. (Note that you can also enter SHA-512 hashes of your email address if you don’t trust PwnedList with your email address – you can use a tool such as this one to generate a SHA-512 hash.)

If your email address does appear on a list, don’t panic – this just means you should ensure you’re not reusing the same passwords on multiple websites. If you use the same password everywhere and your email address appears on one (or more) of these lists, you have a problem – you should change your passwords immediately.

LastPass also hosts some tools that allow you to see whether a specific password appears on the leaked lists of LinkedIn or Last.fm passwords. You can actually plug passwords in and see if someone was using them. The results show how weak many passwords are – plug in “password123” and you can see that at least one person was using it as their LinkedIn password.

Your email account is the center of your online security – websites generally allow you to change your password as long as you can click a link in an email. If someone else gains access to your email account, it can be game over for your other accounts. Read How To Recover After Your Email Password Is Compromised for more tips on protecting yourself.

We’ve covered several solutions for accessing your desktop remotely over the Internet, including TeamViewer and VNC. However, if you have a Professional edition of Windows, you already have Windows Remote Desktop installed.

By default, Windows Remote Desktop will only work on your local network. To access Remote Desktop over the Internet, you’ll need to use a VPN or forward ports on your router.

Before you continue, enable Remote Desktop on your computer and ensure you can access it from other computers on your local network.

If you create a virtual private network (VPN), you won’t have to expose the Remote Desktop server directly to the Internet. Instead, you’ll first have to join your computer to the VPN. Your remote computer will act as if it’s part of the same local network as the computer running the Remote Desktop server. This will allow you to access Remote Desktop and other services only exposed on your local network.

There are a number of VPN applications you can use to create your own VPN, from complicated servers you configure by hand to easy-to-use graphical applications. We recommend LogMeIn Hamachi – download and install it on the computer you want to Remote Desktop to. Click here for more information on setting up Hamachi.

Once you’ve created an account, you can log into Hamachi on another computer and join both computers onto the same “Hamachi network.” They’ll act as if they’re connected directly, even if you’re doing this over the Internet.

You can now use the Remote Desktop Connection application on your computer to connect to the Remote Desktop server. Use the IPv4 address of the other computer, which is displayed in the Hamachi window while you’re connected.

You can also skip the VPN and expose the Remote Desktop server directly to the Internet. If you do this, ensure you have strong passwords set up on your computer. You wouldn’t want malicious people logging into your computer remotely.

We’ll go over the process quickly here. For more detailed help, read our in-depth guide to port forwarding. If you follow that guide, ensure you forward TCP port 3389 to the computer running Remote Desktop.

First, locate the IP address of the computer running Remote Desktop. On the computer running Remote Desktop, open the Control Panel, click View network status and tasks, and click the name of your current connection to the right of Connections. Click the Details button and note the number displayed to the right of IPv4 Address. (Click here for more detailed step-by-step instructions to find your computer’s IP address.)

Next, access your router’s web interface. If you don’t know its address, it’s probably the same as the “IPv4 Default Gateway” address in the Network Connection Details window. Plug this address into your web browser’s address bar to access the router’s web interface.

Log into the router and locate the Port Forwarding section. Forward TCP port 3389 to the IPv4 address you located earlier.

You can now log into Remote Desktop over the Internet – connect to your network’s external IP address, also known as its public IP address.

If you’ve forwarded ports, you may want to set up a dynamic DNS service so you can always connect, even if your network’s IP address changes. You may also want to set up a static IP address on the computer running the Remote Desktop server. This will ensure that the computer’s internal IP address won’t change – if it does, you’ll have to change your port forwarding configuration.

It’s easy to focus on how Windows 8’s new interface doesn’t feel at home on a traditional desktop PC or laptop. But that’s only one part of Windows 8 – the Windows 8 desktop includes a variety of useful improvements.

If you’re a desktop user, you owe it to yourself to look over the improvements and consider upgrading. If Microsoft hadn’t removed the traditional Start menu and added a new interface, we’d all be considering Windows 8’s desktop an upgrade.

Windows 8 uses some tricks to dramatically improve its boot speed. Some people have seen boot times drop from 30 to 15-20 seconds on existing hardware. Instead of shutting down normally, Windows 8 employs a clever trick – it saves the state of low-level software such as the kernel and hardware drivers to the disk and restores them when you boot it up. Essentially, Windows 8 “hibernates” low-level system software instead of shutting it down, resulting in greatly increased boot speeds.

New Windows 8 PCs using UEFI will also boot faster than systems using the old-style BIOS.

File copying in Windows 8 is dramatically improved. The new file copy dialog allows you to pause file-copying operations, view multiple file-copying operations in the same window, and more easily manage file conflicts. The interface is simple by default, but you can also expand the dialog to view more information, including a graph of the file transfer’s speed over time.

For power uses with multiple monitors, windows 8 allows you to place separate taskbars and wallpapers on each monitor. Previously, this required third-party software.

The new Task Manager is a huge improvement over the old one. It features a Startup software manager that allows users to easily control the software that loads at startup. It’s also easier to understand at a glance, with color-coded resource usage columns and more human-readable program names. You can also quickly research a mysterious process online by right-clicking it and using the Search online option.

Windows Explorer has seen quite a few changes. For one, it’s now named File Explorer. While some users may dislike the new ribbon interface, it makes it easier to access powerful options like viewing hidden files without digging through menus and dialog boxes. You can also easily collapse the ribbon if you never want to see it.

There are also quite a few straight-up improvements, including the ability to mount ISO and VHD files by double-clicking them – no need to install any additional software. The Up button on the toolbar that was removed in Windows 7 is now back.

Storage Spaces is a power-user feature that allows you to combine multiple physical volumes into one logical volume. In other words, you can create a pool of storage from several physical hard disks. The storage pool will behave as if it were one hard disk.

Windows 8’s included Hyper-V feature allows you to create virtual machines out-of-the-box. Hyper-V was previously used on Windows Server and replaces the Windows Virtual PC virtualization solution used for Windows XP Mode on Windows 7. For example, you can use Hyper-V to install Ubuntu on a virtual machine without installing any third-party software.

The ability to refresh your device to its factory state may seem like a tablet feature, but it isn’t. You can actually create your own system image and refresh Windows to it, quickly resetting Windows 8 to a fresh-installed state whenever you like. This can save you time when reinstalling Windows.

Low-level system changes, including optimizations to squeeze more battery life out of tablets and other portable computers, should result in a more power-efficient operating system and longer battery life. The removal of Aero should also result in longer battery life for laptops.

Security has seen a lot of attention in Windows 8. Microsoft has finally included an integrated antivirus in Windows 8. It’s named Windows Defender, but it’s actually a renamed Microsoft Security Essentials. This will ensure that even less-experienced Windows users have an antivirus, but you can easily disable it and install any other antivirus product you prefer.

Secure Boot provides protection from rootkits that hijack the startup process, assuming you’re using a new PC with UEFI instead of the traditional BIOS. (On Intel x86 PCs, you can disable Secure Boot or add your own keys to Secure Boot in the UEFI firmware, so Secure Boot won’t prevent you from installing Linux. However, Secure Boot is used to lock-down ARM-based Windows RT computers.)

The integration of Microsoft’s SmartScreen filter at a lower level helps prevent less experienced uses from downloading and installing malware by warning them when they install software that is known-bad, or software that hasn’t been seen before.

There are also low-level changes to memory allocation and ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) that make security vulnerabilities harder to exploit, even if security holes are found.

If these were the only changes that were made in Windows 8, desktop users would see it as a worthy upgrade over Windows 7 – especially for $40.

Even if you dislike Windows 8’s new interface, the availability of third-party Start menus and software that hides a lot (but not all) of the new interface on the desktop should make you seriously consider upgrading to Windows 8 if these improvements seem significant to you.