What a password provides

Usage examples of access.

In high school, one of my all-time favorite pranks was gaining unauthorized access to the telephone switch and changing the class of service of a fellow phone phreak.

That role gave him access to the transfer procedures, including how bank officials arranged for a transfer to be sent.

An experienced social engineer is able to gain access to virtually any targeted information by using the strategies and tactics of his craft.

It goes on just about every personnel form he fills out, lots of people in the company have access to it -human resources, payroll, and, obviously, the outside travel agency.

Could that information be used by a person pretending to be somebody who has legitimate access to the corporate network?

Maybe somebody posted it on their intranet just as a convenience to their own employees, never realizing that it made the information available to everyone on the Internet who has access to a good search engine such as Google -including the just-plain-curious, the wannabe cop, the hacker, and the organized crime boss.

Appropriate training for people who have trusted access to such information should be designed around the answers to these questions.

I now had access to one computer, which turned out to be running an older version of the UNIX operating system.

Under UNIX, the operating system maintains a password file which con-rains the encrypted passwords of everybody authorized to access that computer.

SECURITY Security that relies on knowing where desired information is, and using a word or name to gain access to that information or computer system.

When an authorized person needs to access the network from offsite, she must first identify herself as an authorized user by typing in her secret PIN and the digits displayed on her token device.

And the problem is that I need to access my workstation and the server from home, and I left my Secure ID in my desk.

After an hour of on-line searching for a technical vulnerability that would give him access to a main development server, he hit the jackpot.

RAT, or Remote Access Trojan, gives the attacker full Access to your computer, just as if he were sitting at your keyboard.

So he ran a program to see if he could connect to any of the services running on that computer, and found an open port with a Telnet service running, which allows one computer to connect remotely to another computer and access it as if directly connected using a dumb terminal.