February 2004

Have you ever heard of the Internet being referred to as the “Wild” before last month’s meeting on
Computer Security? Our speaker was John Hill Rogers, MCSE who is an information security specialist, technical trainer, and author of custom curriculum at Sage Data Security, Inc. He is also author of the book, A Business Owner's Guide to Finding Qualified Tech Support. John delivered a powerful presentation on computer hackers and the history behind their devious tricks.

John opened with Microsoft’s Ten Immutable Laws Of Security. Following these eye-opening pointers, he briefed us on the history of computer crime from 1998 to the present. It was amazing to see the amount of attacks as each year progressed. Some of the attacks we discussed were Network, Software, Physical, Social Engineering, and Email attacks. We talked about Port Scanning Attacks, Script Kiddies, and Trojan Horse programs. John demonstrated a password attack on a computer that was just rebuilt the day before. It had over 200 attempted attacks by computer hackers.

Why Have Strong Passwords? Here’s a statistic that’s quite illustrative: A lower case password of eight characters has 26^8 possibilities (208,827,064,576). At one million attempts per second it would take 59 hours to crack. A complex eight character password has 62^8 possibilities (218,340,105,584,896). At one million attempts per second, it would take 6.9 years.

Sending us his presentation would breach Sage Data Security’s privacy policy, but John graciously sent us a document containing all the resources and links discussed at the meeting.

Download Computer Security Session Resources

If you have any questions for John, his contact information is:

John H. Rogers
Sage Data Security
johnr@sagedatasecurity.com
www.sagedatasecurity.com
207-879-7242 X2