A user’s account on a website is like a house. The password is the key, and logging in is like walking through the front door. When a user can’t remember their password, it’s like losing their keys. When a user’s account is hacked, it’s like their house is getting broken into.
Nearly half of Americans (47%) have had their account hacked in the last year alone. Are web designers and developers taking enough measures to prevent these problems? Or do we need to rethink passwords?
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Let’s get a few things out of the way first. This isn’t your regular Smashing Magazine article. It’s not a “how to“; it won’t show you how to build a better menu or improve your project tomorrow. This article shows you how a core problem in computer science works and why we’re all pretending we know something for certain when we really have no idea.
You’re looking at Smashing Magazine right now because you’re standing on the shoulders of a giant assumption called “P versus NP”. It’s a math problem that protects governments, runs the Internet and makes online shopping possible.
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“Danger: malware ahead!” and “This website may harm your computer” are the two sentences that I hate most and that I don’t want any of my clients to see when they open their website. If you have seen any of them on your own website, then I’ll bet you still remember your panic attack and how you struggled to get your website up and running ASAP.
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When people talk about WordPress security, file permissions and ownership are usually the last thing on their minds. Installing security plugins is a good practice and a must for every WordPress website. However, if your file-system permissions aren’t set up correctly, most of your security measures could be easily bypassed by intruders.
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In the construction industry, a “firewall” is a specially-built wall designed to stop a fire from spreading between sections of a building. The term spread to other industries like car manufacturing, and in the late 1980s it made its way into computing.
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Log-in forms are used more often than sign-up forms. Users only need to sign up once to create an account, whereas they will need to log in multiple times to access their account. Because log-in forms are used so frequently, there’s a strong chance that users will end up typing their password in front of other people.
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WordPress security is serious business. Exploits of vulnerabilities in WordPress’ architecture have led to mass compromises of servers through cross-site contamination. WordPress’ extensibility increases its vulnerability; plugins and themes house flawed logic, loopholes, Easter eggs, backdoors and a slew of other issues. Firing up your computer to find that you’re supporting a random cause or selling Viagra can be devastating.
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At our company, we process a lot of requests on the leading gift cards and coupons websites in the world. The senior developers had a meeting in late October to discuss working on a solution to replicate the MySQL functions of AES_ENCRYPT and AES_DECRYPT in the language of PHP.
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E-commerce runs on secrets. Those secrets let you update your blog, shop at Amazon and share code on GitHub. Computer security is all about keeping your secrets known only to you and the people you choose to share them with.
We’ve been sharing secrets for centuries, but the Internet runs on a special kind of secret sharing called public-key cryptography. Most secret messages depend on a shared secret—a key or password that everyone agrees on ahead of time. Public-key cryptography shares secret messages without a shared secret key and makes technologies like SSL possible.
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Security has become a foremost concern on the Web in the past few years. Hackers have always been around, but with the increase in computer literacy and the ease of access to virtually any data, the problem has increased exponentially. It is now rare for a new website to not get comment spam within days of its release, even if it is not promoted at all.
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