What’s the first thing that came to your mind when you read the title? How do you perceive the term ‘cryptography’? It has something to do with secrecy and hiding right! Anyway, cryptography is the art of protecting information by transforming it into an unreadable format. Only the people who have the secret key can decode this message. The process of transforming the information into something unreadable is called Encryption and the reverse process is called Decryption. Let’s say you have a message you want to send to your friend. The message to be encoded is called plaintext and the encrypted message is called ciphertext. The goal here is to find the most secure way of transforming the plaintext into ciphertext. How do we encrypt it? How do we make sure it remains safe even if someone happens to see it? Continue reading “Decrypting Cryptography”
Tag: Passwords
The Art Of Password Cracking
The elusive art of password-cracking has enticed many a mortal! Everyone has, at one point or the other, contemplated cracking someone’s password to get access to their private information. Whenever people hear the term ‘hacking’, the first thing that comes to their mind is ‘cracking passwords’. A lot of people think that password-cracking is the very definition of hacking. Some people think that password-cracking is the same as stealthily looking at someone type their password. I hate to burst your bubble, but that’s not password-cracking. What exactly is it then? How do we do it? Continue reading “The Art Of Password Cracking”
The Computer Infections
Do you remember getting incensed because something slowed down your computer? You don’t remember what you did, but your computer is now slow, buggy and some of the things are not working the way they are supposed to. Sounds familiar? A layman would say “your computer has been infected with a virus”. Is that right? Sure, your computer has been infected. But not everything that infects is a virus. Just like how we have racists for races, we have softists for softwares! After reading this post, you will not be one of those. You would have come across terms like malware, spyware, worms etc. Now what exactly are these things? Continue reading “The Computer Infections”
The Linkedin Debacle
If you are following tech news, you might very well be aware of the fact that there was a security leak in Linkedin recently. A Russian hacker leaked around 6.5 million Linkedin passwords along with 1.5 million passwords from a dating website (possibly eHarmony) to get the total to around 8 million. If you haven’t changed your Linkedin password yet, it’s about time! Now how on earth could this have happened? What exactly went wrong? Continue reading “The Linkedin Debacle”
Perpetual Enigma 