Is Your Webmail Account Safe from Hackers?

An US Vice Presidential candidate recently had her Yahoo Mail account hacked into. Is your own webmail account safe from hackers? Yahoo Mail isn’t the only Web-based mail service that could be duped into giving up someone else’s account password. Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are all vulnerable.

How does the breach happen?

All webmail services rely on automated password reset mechanisms that can be abused by anyone who knows the username associated with an account and an answer to a single security question such as:

What is your mother’s maiden name?

What is the name of the city in which you were born?

What is the name of your favourite pet?

If you have given truthful answers to any of such questions while opening your webmail account, then your email account can be easily broken into by any ordinary person who knows the answers to these questions.

Some of the personal information that would provide answers to the security questions would be easily found in social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook or Orkut. And the hacker can use this answer to break into your account to reset your password and lock you out of your own webmail account.

How can you protect your account?

You can easily avoid having your webmail account hacked with some simple security practices. If a webmail service (or for that matter any internet service) asks you for an answer to a security question, don’t tell it the truth! Honesty is not always the best policy! Or select such a question whose answer cannot be found by anyone. But whatever answer you do give, remember it yourself !!

Why More Megapixels may actually Spoil your Pictures

In order to convince you to buy a new digital camera, manufacturers are toeing the more-megapixels-are-better myth. But buyers of compact point & shoot cameras are slowly beginning to realise that buying a camera with higher megapixels does not necessarily improve the image quality. What they still don’t know is that more megapixels may actually spoil the image quality of your pictures!

People who blindly buy a 12 MP camera instead of a 10 MP camera are the same ones who purchase a computer with a 2.6ghz processor instead of a 2.2ghz processor even though the former may have much lesser RAM as compared to the latter.

Megapixels & Image Sensor Size

The size of the sensor of your camera’s lens is more important than the number of megapixels. Compact cameras are normally equipped with a sensor size such as 1/2.5-inch, 1/2.3-inch or 1/1.6-inch. For those who aren’t very strong in mathematics, a 1/1.6-inch sensor is bigger than a 1/2.3-inch sensor.

As the megapixel war between manufacturers escalates, they cram more and more megapixels into the same sensor size simply because larger sensors are more expensive to make. As a result, the individual sensors become smaller, they receive less light, and eventually it increases the noise, which looks like grain in your photos. To counter this, camera processors impose heavy noise reduction which results in blurring, reduces the amount of fine detail and make the pictures very soft.

How many Megapixels do I stop at ?

What is important is to compare the number of megapixels in relation to the size of the sensor. This is measured in terms of what is known as ‘pixel density’. So while a 12 MP camera on a 1/2.3-inch sensor would be extremely poor, a 12 MP camera with a 1/1.6-inch sensor may not be that bad, all other specs remaining equal.

The best approach would be to first get the largest sensor in your budget, as larger sensor translates into better pictures even in low light, and then look for the number of megapixels giving lower pixel density on that sensor, subject to a minimum of 3-4 MP. Of course, nowadays you won’t get anything lesser than 8 MP.

The reason why DSLRs tend to have better image quality than compact cameras is that they are equipped with a much larger lens. This is not to say that there is no point in buying compact cameras. It only means that you should not buy a compact camera having a very high pixel density.

Phasing out of cameras with lower megapixels

Most manufacturers such as Sony, Canon, Panasonic & Nikon are phasing out their 7 MP and 8 MP cameras in favour of 12 MP cameras with the result that soon you won’t find good cameras in stores with a low pixel density. So buy your 8 MP camera today instead of buying those newer 12 MP cameras. All other specs remaining equal, not only would you get sharper pictures, but you would also save storage space on your memory card and hard drive!

Trojan For Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5 Found

Secure Mac is reporting that it has discovered multiple variants of a new Trojan horse in the wild that affects Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5.

The Trojan horse is currently being distributed from a hacker website, where discussion has taken place on distributing the Trojan horse through iChat and Limewire.

The Trojan horse runs hidden on the system, and allows complete remote access to the system. It can also transmit system and user passwords, and can avoid detection by opening ports in the firewall and turning off system logging.

The Trojan horse, named AppleScript.THT, can log keystrokes, take pictures with the built-in Apple iSight camera, take screenshots, and turn on file sharing. The Trojan horse exploits a recently discovered vulnerability with the Apple Remote Desktop Agent, which allows it to run as root.

The Trojan is distributed as either a compiled AppleScript, called ASthtv05 (60 KB in size), or as an application bundle called AStht_v06 (3.1 MB in size). The user must download and open the Trojan horse in order to become infected. Once the Trojan horse is running, it will move itself into the /Library/Caches/ folder, and add itself to the System Login Items.

Once installed, the Trojan horse turns on File Sharing, Web Sharing, and Remote Login. If the filename of the Trojan horse has not been changed, it can be located in the /Library/Caches folder under the name AStht_06.app.

Until a patch is issued for the Apple Remote Desktop Agent exploit, SecureMac classifies the security risk presented by this Trojan horse as high.

Protection: To protect your system against this threat, run MacScan 2.5.2 (MacScan is a product of SecureMac) with the latest Spyware Definitions update (2008011), dated June 19th, 2008. SecureMac recommends that users download files only from trusted sources and sites.

My Dream Phone or iPhone whatever you say now in INDIA with VODAFONE and AIRTEL

When the iPhone 3G was announced, unlike Airtel, Vodafone made no formal announcement that it would be bringing the much awaited mobile phone to India.

Apple, though, confirmed this by mentioning that India would get the iPhone 3G through Airtel and Vodafone.

Now Vodafone has announced that people can pre-register for the iPhone with them, indicating that the iPhone will be available soon. The company is tight-lipped on the question 'How soon?'. All they are willing to divulge is that the iPhone will be compatible only with the 2G networks and some of the iPhone 3G's features may not work here.

Airtel too is inviting people to book their iPhone with them.

List of SOFTWAREZ to keep your PC updated

Bit Defender or McAfee
Tune Up Utilities 2008
Internet Download Manager 5.05
Microsoft Office 2007
Adobe Reader 8.0
Nero Burning Rom 8.0
Adobe Photoshop C.S 2
Winrar
Real Player 11
Windows Media Player 11
i Tunes
Winamp
Pocket Oxford Dictionary
Mozilla Firefox 3.0
Google Earth Pro
Yahoo Messenger
Windows Live Messenger