Hacker's New Tool -- Local Languages

Hacker's help wanted ads are appearing on underground Internet channels as mallicious code designers increase the demand for programmers with foreign-language skills to help launch country-specific attacks, McAfee Inc said in a report.

Hackers want to craft compelling and grammatically correct Web pages and spam emails -- which are crucial in fooling people to download viruses or reveal personal information like credit card numbers.

By localising their attacks, hackers can better target software and sites popular in specific countries -- such as peer-to-peer network applications in Japan, online gaming sites in China, and banks in Brazil. They can also limit their attacks to countries where law enforcement is more likely to be lax.

The report found that just 67 per cent of spam is now written in English, a sign that broadband penetration in emerging markets has made attacks in non-english languages increasingly lucrative.

Attacks written in local languages aren't new, but the torrent of money flowing into criminal coffers from Internet attacks has made hackers increasingly sophisticated about lures that will work on their targets.

“It speaks to the underlying professionalism and understanding of business that we've seen in the past few years and that we haven't seen in the past,” said David Marcus, security research and communications manager with McAfee. "They're approaching malware as a business and are looking to build their businesses globally.”

Marcus added that hackers' recruitment pitches often take two forms: hackers looking to employ virus-writers to design spam and websites in local languages and those hackers looking to trade malicious programmes in different languages.

Hackers already have made progress in english-language spam. While three quarters were packed with typos and other errors just a few years ago, only about 10 per cent do so today.

Moreover it doesn't take a huge investment in time to craft this stuff perfectly.

Hack Windows Passwords In few minutes

This excellent video shows how hackers can crack your Windows password in couple of minutes. It also offers suggestion on how to create strong passwords that are tough to crack.

They analyzed the passwords that were not successfully cracked - the 14 character passwords were found to be really strong.

If a password takes more than a week for a hacker to crack, he is likely to give up and more to another comptuer that uses weak password. A must watch video.