http://192.168.1.1 is the URL, which you have to enter in your web browser, in case you want to access and tweak the settings, admin and password of your network router. It is a way to access the network device attached to your computer connected at the private IP address 192.168.1.1.

What is Private IP Address 192.168.1.1

192.168.1.1 is one of the private IP address, which most of the manufacturers of network router set as default. The private IP means that this IP address is being referred from the home computer only. Unlike other public IP addresses, which are unique for the entire web, the private IP can be repeated in different networks. In other words, both you and I, and everyone else, can use http://192.168.1.1 at the same time to configure the settings of our routers. It is not possible for public IP Addressses.

http://192.168.1.1 Router Admin & Password List

The admin and password details are not used by most of the people on a regular basis. Once they are set, people usually forget about them, and this is the reason, I have found many people struggling for the default router login details at a later date.

In case you have changed the default username and password of the http://192.168.1.1 Router, then there is no solution other than trying a hardware reset. But in case, you have not changed the password, then you can try to access the router by using a combination of password given below.

DiskDigger is a freeware tool, which allows you to recover files from any type of media that your computer can read. This includes USB flash drives, memory cards (SD, CompactFlash, Memory Stick, etc), and of course your hard drive. The types of files that it recovers include photos, videos, music, documents, and many other formats.

DiskDigger can even scan reformatted or badly formatted disks (disks to which Windows can’t assign a drive letter), and even disks with bad sectors. It bypasses the Windows file system drivers and scans your disk directly. It has its own built-in support for the following file systems: FAT12 (floppy disks), FAT16 (older memory cards), FAT32 (newer memory cards and hard disks), NTFS (newer hard disks), and exFAT (Microsoft’s new successor to FAT32).

Advice: Like any other data recovery tool, it is advised that you should save DiskDigger on a different drive from the one on which the data recovery attempt is being made. You should run it in portable mode for best results. And like any other tool, the efficiency of the data recovery depends upon the time elapsed after the data was deleted and the use of the disk.

[Download DiskDigger]

But there are certain tools free from Microsoft, and which do the job to the perfection.

Automatated TroubleShooting Service – A Freeware Tool to Fix Common Windows XP / Vista / 7 Errors

Microsoft’s ATS is one such freeware tool, which can scan your computer for possible common Windows errors automatically and fix them. It can automatically detect and fix common maintenance problems such as broken desktop shortcuts, unused icons, disk volume errors, and incorrect system time display. There are lots of other features also to make your life easier.

Check it out.

[Microsoft's ATS Download]

Twitter is no doubt in rage. With the recent joining of celebrities like Barack Obama and Bill Gates, Twitter has gained unprecedented popularity in such a short time.

And as a general rule, popularity not only attracts the genuine users, but also attracts scammers, spammers, hackers and malware writers. Keeping the trend you might come across lots of Twitter traffic scam sites, which lure innocent Twitter users by promising them loads of followers and traffic.

Someone, just sent a link for such a website (http://twitterbuilding.com/) to me. I used my sandbox to go to the link. And Google Chrome warned me it as a possible phishing site. I carefully proceeded and found the following.

This site is promising you to make a VIP member and you just have to give them your Twitter username and password. Pretty easy stuff to fool around.

But it is dis-heartening to note that people continue to fall for such simple traps and give their credentials.

Passwords are like your keys to online security. It is a pity that despite understanding the need of strong passwords, most people still continue to use weak passwords.

Convenience of use and security are often at diagonally opposite ends, when it comes to web applications. People fall for convenience and avoid using strong passwords, because they do not want to get into the hassles of remembering strong passwords. But, we always give more importance to PC Security then convenience.

And in case, you want to have your cake and eat it too, then you always have the option of using a good password manager like Roboform.

Most Commonly Used Password List – Is Your Password There on the List?

Recently a popular website Rockyou.com was hacked to steal the passwords of several of its users, which landed on a few hacker’s fora. Imperva has published an analysis of the data and some of the findings are really interesting.

1. About 30% of users chose passwords whose length is equal or below six characters.
2. Moreover, almost 60% of users chose their passwords from a limited set of alpha-numeric characters.
3. Nearly 50% of users used names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial passwords (consecutive digits, adjacent keyboard keys, and so on). The most common password among Rockyou.com account owners is “123456”.

Here is a list of the top 20 most commonly used passwords in the list.

How Such Lists of Most Commonly Used Passwords Help the Hackers

If a hacker would have used the list of the top 5000 passwords as a dictionary for brute force attack on Rockyou.com users, it would take only one attempt (per account) to guess 0.9% of the users passwords or a rate of one
success per 111 attempts.

Assuming an attacker with a DSL connection of 55KBPS upload rate and that each attempt is 0.5KB in size, it means that the attacker can have 110 attempts per second. At this rate, a hacker will gain access to one new account every second or just less than 17 minutes to compromise 1000 accounts.

And the problem is exponential. After the first wave of attacks, it would only take 116 attempts per account to compromise 5% of the accounts, 683 attempts to compromise 10% of accounts and about 5000 attempts to compromise 20% of accounts.

[Link to Complete Report (pdf)]

Wireless Router for Internet access, are a rage today because of the convenience provided by them. No cables are to be used, and this means that you can move your laptop to virtually any corner of your house or office.

But convenience comes at a cost, and in most cases, it means vulnerability in your PC Security. And in this case, the vulnerability is the chances of somebody else listening or sniffing to the data sent / received by you through your wireless router.

Protecting the security of your wireless router is extremely important, and one of the basic thing you can do is to protect the administration of your router through the use of a secured wireless router password.

Are You afraid of Forgetting the Wireless Router Password

Since the password on the wireless router is not used on a regular basis, because you do not require to change the router settings daily, many people tend to forget their router password. If you are like that, then there are few steps you can take.

Step 1: If the password is stored in your browser memory, and you are able to access the router administration panel, then you can read another post on this blog to show Hidden Password Field Text.

Step 2: In case, you do not remember the router password and are not even able to login into its admin panel, then you can try to use a set of default password. We have earlier published a list of default router passwords for it.

Step 3: Step 2 will be applicable only in case you have not changed the default settings of your wireless router password. In case you have changed it earlier, then you might have to use the hardware reset button often found on the down / back side of your wireless router. Remember to hold it down for at least 30 seconds. This will return all the settings of your router to the factory settings.

OSX is considered to be a relatively safer operating system and many security enthusiasts prefer to use it over a Windows machine. Like All other operating systems, Mac OSX allows you to create user accounts with password previleges.

In case you have forgotten your Mac OSX Password and you want to crack, reset or clear the OS X Password, then you can use following steps. his procedure requires you to at least remember your username.

• Hold Apple+S when booting to enter single user mode
• #sh /etc/rc
• #passwd yourusername
• #reboot

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Tip: If you are like me who want to have your cake and eat it too, then RoboForm is an ideal solution for you. RoboForm is world’s largest used Password manager, which allows you to totally forget about botheration of remembering passwords and also handles their security very well.

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Many people do not know that the Hard Disk in their Laptops also have an option to set up an HDD Password. This is different from a BIOS Password and is stored in the firmware of the Hard Disk.

On the face of it, it looks like a great means of adding an extra layer for your PC Security, but setting an HDD Password can sometimes prove to be very risky, in case you forget your HDD Password. In such case, the Hard Disk becomes unusable and there is almost no way to retrieve the data stored in it.

Moving a locked hard disk to another machine will not unlock it, since the hard disk password is stored in the hard disk firmware and moves with the hard disk. Also, adding a new (unlocked) hard disk to a locked machine may cause the new hard disk to become locked. Also, note that hard disk lock passwords cannot be removed by reformatting the disk, fdisk or any other software procedure (since the disk will not allow and reads or writes to the disk, it cannot be reformatted.)

How to Crack, Clear, Unlock or Reset An HDD Password

In case you have landed in a position that you have set a HDD password and have forgotten it, there are some services, which claim to be able to retrieve the data, but I have no knowledge about the truth in their claims. However, there are tools, which can clear and unlock the HDD password. But in this case, your data will not be usable, but at least, you can use your hard disk.

One such tool is HDDUnlock. Please note that HDD Unlock Wizard only unlocks Hard Disk Drives. It does not remove BIOS user or administrator passwords. In order to unlock a laptop drive, you have to remove it from the notebook and attach it to a desktop PC by using a 2.5-inch 44-pin IDE to 3.5-inch 40/80 pin IDE adapter.
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Tip: If you are like me who want to have your cake and eat it too, then RoboForm is an ideal solution for you. RoboForm is world’s largest used Password manager, which allows you to totally forget about botheration of remembering passwords and also handles their security very well.

If you search it on Google, Yahoo or any other search engine, you might come across many such websites, where you are asked to send the email login details of your email account alongwith the email ID of the yahoo account you want to crack.

They tell that once they crack your desired yahoo email, they will send the username password to you.

But beware. This is nothing but a ploy to get the email login details of your own account. There is no such service, which will crack the yahoo email password and send to you.

One such page, which I came across recently, read like the following.

How To Hack Yahoo Passwords

This is the best way to hack anyone’s Yahoo password. First, open a new email message.

Type in the “To:” box this email address: passwd_bot@yahoo.com. This is the email robot that Yahoo staffers use to check user accounts. In the subject line, type “CHK PASSWD” (type this in upper case *exactly* as shown).

In the body, type on the 1st line your yahoo email address (ex: you@hotmail.com). On the 2nd line, type yourpassword. And on the 3rd line, type the email address you want to hack (ex: them@yahoo.com). You must add “;” (no quotes!) at the end of each line so their server will process it as a command.

Here is an example of what the email should look like: To: passwd_bot@yahoo.com

Subject: CHK PASSWD

You@yahoo.com;

12345678;

Them@yahoo.com;

The security hole has been well documented on BugTraq, but those lamers at yahoo haven’t fixed it yet. Get it while you can! 

Can you see the plot. Don’t fall for them.
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Tip: If you are like me who want to have your cake and eat it too, then RoboForm is an ideal solution for you. RoboForm is world’s largest used Password manager, which allows you to totally forget about botheration of remembering passwords and also handles their security very well.

Many times, due to these actions, the system may become un-bootable and can no longer be used. In such a case it becomes almost impossible to retrieve the important data stored in it. There may be other situations also when the system has become unbootable and your first priority is to retrieve the data instead of cleaning and curing the sytem.

In such a case, a virus checker bood CD is what you need.

Paragon Rescue Kit – A Rescue Boot CD for Virus Checking also

Paragon Rescue Kit professionally fixes boot problems as well as retrieves your data when your system fails to boot. It even rescues deleted partitions. All, you need to do to achieve complete control over any situation is burn the software on your CD/DVD.

In case of a system malfunction, caused either by a virus attack or file corruption, you can retrieve valuable information from your disks and copy it to another local drive, partition or save the data to CD/DVD. The File Transfer Wizard helps you to export data as easy and convenient as possible.

[Register and Download Paragon Rescue Kit]