Seems like Myspace addon on site rockyou.com fell victim to sql injection flaw and exposed more than 32 millions of passwords in plaintext.
http://igigi.baywords.com/rockyou-com-exposed-more-than-32-millions-of-passwords-in-plaintext/

If you have forgot your Windows 7 homegroup password, then this will show you how to view or print it to see what it is again. You must have this password to be able to join a computer to your homegroup.

HomeGroup makes it easy to share pictures, music, documents, videos, and printers with other people on your home network. You would have had to created a homegroup first before you will have a password to use to join other computer to your homegroup.

1. Open the Control Panel (all items view), and click on the Network and Sharing Center icon.
2. Click on the Choose homegroup and sharing options link.
3. Click on the View or print homegroup password link.
4. Write down this password down, or click on Print this page to print the passoword. When done, close this window.

NOTE: The password is case sensitive, so it will need to be typed exactly as it appears here when used to join a computer to the homegroup.

If you’re one of the many who are jailbreaking your iPhone to get options such as tethering, make sure you change the root access password once you do.
In addition to your possibly getting Rick-Rolled

Your jailbroken phone could possibly be held for ransom

If you’ve never changed the default device password, now’s the time. Here’s how:

The app to use on the iPhone is called MobileTerminal and it’s available for free in the Cydia store.

Once you have MobileTerminal installed, launch it and you should see a prompt saying this or similar:

iPhoneName: ~ Mobile$

• At that prompt, type: passwd
• You’ll be prompted for the ‘old’ (current) password for the mobile user.  Enter this as the old password: alpine
• You’ll then be prompted to enter the new password – so just type in your desired new password.  Use good password principles if possible (long and stong).  You will not see characters appearing on the screen as you type – that’s normal, not a concern.
• You’ll then be prompted to re-enter the new password.  Do that.
• You should then be returned to the Mobile$ prompt that you started on when opening the MobileTerminal app.  There’s no success message to say the password was changed – but if you’re returned to the prompt and do not get an error, the change was successful.  And you’re done with change for the mobile account.
• The second primary admin account for the iPhone is called root – so now you need to change that as well.
• Type this to switch to the root user: login root
• You’ll be prompted for the root user’s current password.  Enter this: alpine
• Type this to start the password change routine again: passwd
• Enter the old password for root (it is ‘alpine’, same as for the mobile user) and enter your desired new password twice, just as you did for the mobile account

Security tube has a nice video on how to gain domain admin access from a workstation using some simple tools

http://securitytube.net/How-to-own-a-Windows-Domain-video.aspx

http://www.thelstalk.com/how-to-hide-your-password/

A backdoor vulnerability in a Time Warner cable modem and Wi-Fi router deployed to 65,000 customers would allow a hacker to remotely access the device’s administrative menu over the web, and potentially change the settings to intercept traffic, according to a blogger who discovered the issue.
David Chen, said he was trying to help a friend change the settings on his cable modem and discovered that Time Warner had hidden administrative functions from its customers with Javascript code. By disabling Javascript in his browser, he was able to see those functions, which included a tool to dump the router’s config file.

That file, it turned out, included the administrative login and password in cleartext. Chen investigated and found the same login and password could access the admin panels for every router in the SMC8014 series on Time Warner’s network , given that the routers also expose their web interfaces to the internet.

Src: chenosaurus.com

This week a friend brought me the new ipod nano which her son locked and she couldnt figure out the password. It’s a real simple fix. Connect the ipod to your computer. makes sure hidden files and folders option is set and browse to “\iPod_Control\Device\_locked” Change the file name from _locked to _unlocked. Save. disconnect. Reset your ipod by holding down the menu and center button. At this point your ipod will be unlocked but you won’t be able to set a new password without first entering the old one(which you don’t know). To set a new password, go back into _unlocked and erase all of the characters in the file and save again. Reset once more. You can now set a new password if you choose.

A new study, which is being published in the Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, details just how long we’ve been aware of the password problem. It cites a study of Unix passwords from 1979, which showed that about 30 percent of the passwords were four characters or less, and about 15 percent being words that appear in the dictionary. Fast forward to 2006, when a separate survey of 34,000 MySpace passwords revealed that the most common were “password1″, “abc123″, “myspace1″, and “password”.

src: arstechnica.com

Follow-up to yesterdays post. A researcher who examined 10,000 Hotmail, MSN and Live.com passwords that were recently exposed online has published an analysis of the list and found that “123456″ was the most commonly used password, appearing 64 times.

Forty-two percent of the passwords used lowercase letters from “a to z”; only 6 percent mixed alpha-numeric and other characters.
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