There have been some notorious cybercriminals over the years, but only a select few hackers have swapped ‘black’ hats for ‘white’.In hacking terms, ‘black’ hats are usually used for the bad guys. They hack the innocent victims, pilfer personal and sensitive data for financial gain and remain largely in the shadows of enterprise IT networks. They’re forever chased by law enforcement.‘White’ hats, by contrast, are the good guys. They are security researchers, who spend their time hacking to find vulnerabilities, and then inform enterprises and web developers of the changes that need to be made.There has been a clear distinction between both and there are enough of them around.
Read on, source: 5 hackers who came over from the dark side
A research paper from Google has looked into the difficulties of standard ‘forgotten password’ personal information verification.The paper, entitled ‘Secrets, Lies, and Account Recovery: Lessons from the Use of Personal Knowledge Questions at Google‘ examined the usage of personal information to trigger a password reset, and discovered that it presents a number of difficulties, including forgetful users, guessable answers and fake responses.The study, which according to Silicon Beat covered ‘hundreds of millions of secret answers and millions of account recovery claims’, discovered that a massive 40 percent of American Google users couldn’t remember the answers to their own security questions.
