Make Tech Easier » password

How To Easily Reset Your WordPress Password via phpMyAdmin

Damien — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:42:00 +0000

I know that it is easy to forget your password, especially when it contains plenty of symbols, digits and upper/lower case. In WordPress, if you have forgotten your password, you can get it to reset your password via your email account. However, in the event that you also forget your username or the email you have used to open the WordPress account (I know this type of situation is rare, but it does happen), you can always reset your password via the phpMyAdmin.

This tutorial is applicable only if your Web host is using phpMyAdmin to manage your database.

Log into your Web host account and go into the phpMyAdmin admin page.

Search for the database that you have configured for the WordPress account.

If you have no idea what is the name of your WordPress database (probably because you used the auto installation script in cPanel) or forgotten the database name, download the wp-config.php file from the WordPress server (using SFTP). You should find your database information there.

On the left side of the phpMyAdmin screen, you should see a list of the table used in WordPress. Scroll down until you see the entry “wp_users“. If you are using a different table prefix other than “wp_“, you should see something like “yourprefix_users”

On the right, click on the Browse button. This will get it to display all the user information. The userpass column is the password field. Note that it is of an unrecognizable format, definitely not the same as the one that you have set for your WordPress. Don’t worry, this is the exact same password that you have set, except that it is encrypted with MD5 Hash.

Now, open a new tab in your browser and head on to MD5 hasher. Enter your password and and click OK to create a md5 hash of that password. Copy the hashed string to your clipboard.

Back to your phpMyAdmin, check the box beside your username and click on the pencil icon to edit the entry.

Replace the password with your newly generated md5hash password.

Click on Go to save the changes.

That’s it. You should be able to log in with the new password now.

Image credit: Tomás Rotger

How To Easily Reset Your WordPress Password via phpMyAdmin originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

Auto-Unlock Keyring Manager In Ubuntu Intrepid

Damien — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 13:35:39 +0000

If you have set your Ubuntu machine to auto-login everytime you start your computer, you will find that as soon as you reach your desktop, the keyring manager will automatically pop up and ask you for the password to unlock itself and retrieve the key to connect to the wireless connection.

The keyring manager is integrated with Gnome such that when you login from the main screen, it will automatically unlock itself as well. However, if you use the auto-login function, Gnome will skip the keyring manager process and log the user in without unlocking the keyring manger.

To get rid of this annoyance, what you can do is to set a blank password for the keyring manager so that it won’t prompt you for password everytime you login.

Do bear in mind that setting a blank password for your keyring manager will expose all your passwords to anyone that use your computer.

Go to Applications -> Accessories -> Password and Encryption Keys

Go to Edit-> Preferences

Highlight the login – Automatically unlocked when user logs in entry. Press the Change Unlock Password button.

Enter your old password and leave blank for the new password. Click Change.

It will prompt you for security issue. Click Use Unsafe Storage to continue.

Done. Next time when you login, the keyring manager won’t prompt you for password again.

Auto-Unlock Keyring Manager In Ubuntu Intrepid originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

How To Store Thousands Of Password With Password Manager

Damien — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 05:29:04 +0000

Remembering one password is easy. Remembering hundreds of passwords is not easy. Even though I have discussed the way to remember thousands of passwords easily, plenty of people still balk at the idea of having to remember so many passwords. So what is the alternative solution? The answer is using a password manager.

For anyone who is lazy (just like me) or is tired of remembering hundreds of password, they only need to remember one master password to activate the password manager, which is a simple task for everyone. There are plenty of free password managers that provide great encryption and security for anyone to store their passwords.

One of my favorite password manager is KeePass (KeePassX for Linux and Mac version). It has an easy-to-use interface and uses strong 256 bits encryption algorithm (AES and TwoFish). The features of KeePassX include:

256 bits AES or TwoFish encryption
Easy to use interface
Customizable. It allows you to save many different information e.g. user names, passwords, urls, attachments and comments in one single database.
Integrated search function allows you to search in a single group or the complete database.
Secure password generation.
Cross platform. This is what attracts me most. Since it can be installed in all OS, I am able to port my password database from one PC to another.

Installation

For Windows OS, download the .exe file from http://keepass.info/download.html
For Mac OSX, download the binary package from http://www.keepassx.org/downloads or .dmg file from Softpedia
For Linux, download the .deb or .rpm file from http://www.keepassx.org/downloads. Alternatively, Ubuntu users can install using Synaptic Package Manager.

Installing and using KeePassX on Ubuntu

Open up your synaptic package manager (System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager). Navigate to ‘keepassx‘ and check the box beside it. Click Apply. This will install the program and its dependency files (libqt4-core and libqt4-gui).

When installation is done, open the KeePassX (Applications -> Accessories -> KeePassX).

To save your password, you must first create a database. Click on File -> New Database. On the window that appears, set your database password. This will be your master password (and the only password that you need to remember), thus make sure you set a strong and hard to guess password.

The next step is to add a new group. This is to allow you to organize your passwords in various groups for easy navigation and retrieval. Click Edit -> New Group. Enter the title of the group and select an icon.

Now you are ready to add your password. Click Edit -> Add New Entry. On the window that appears, there are various fields that you need to fill in. Beside the password field, there is a ‘Gen‘ button. Press it if you wish to generate a random password.

On the generate random password window, you can select from a series of options to generate a strong password. Since you are not remembering the password, it doesn’t matter if it generates a 20 characters long password that is full of weird characters. What’s more important is its ability to give you a strong protection.

Once finished, click Accept to pass the newly generated password to the password entry form.

Click OK to save your password.

Done.

To add more passwords, click Edit -> New Entry.

Before you exit the program, remember to save the database (File -> Save database), else all the effort will be gone to waste.

How To Store Thousands Of Password With Password Manager originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)

A Fool Proof Way To Remember Thousands Of Passwords Effortlessly

Damien — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 04:07:46 +0000

One of the most common headache that people are facing is to remember the dozens of passwords associated with every site. What most people do to simplify the matter is to use one single password for all their acounts. To make thing even simpler, an easy to remember word is used as the password. It is not surprising to see that ‘password’ tops the list for the 10 most common passwords. Some of them trying to be smart, put a 1 behind the ‘password’ (which means ‘password1′) and pray that the hackers are not as smart as them to come up with such an ‘ingenious’ idea.

The problem with using the same password is that once someone finds out your password, all your accounts become instantly accessible by third party. If someone cracks into your Amazon.com or Paypal account that contains your credit card information, the result is going to be devastating.

How can I remember so many passwords?

In programming, a secure way of storing password in database is to use salted hash. A string of words is used as the key (also known as ’salt’) and append to the user entered password. This newly formed password is then hashed using md5 encryption and the result is stored into the database. To illustrate, a user entered ‘password1′ as his password. The script then appends a salt known as ‘iloveyou’ to the password which results in ‘iloveyoupassword1′. This password is then encrypted to produce a random string ‘228e4011b6afbevge44e3d787d606407′ which is then stored into the database.

Now, how does all this apply to you?

This is simple. Using the same concept as salting, you can generate thousands of passwords easily. Using one base password, what you need to do is to append the site name to your password. For example, if my base password is ‘iloveyou’, then I can set the password for my Yahoo email as ‘iloveyouyahooemail’ and bank account password as ‘iloveyouXYZbank’. In this case, you can generate different password for different sites. And since your password is long and not a word found in the dictionary, it will be difficult for hacker to crack it.

To make your password even more secure, you can use a mix of number, upper case, lower case and special characters for your base password. ‘15@gdH34′ would be a good base password. Some websites only allow 8 characters password, so you might have to play around with your base password to control the generated password length.

What I have listed here is only one of the way you can use to generate passwords. You are free to experiment and set your own rule. If you have some interesting ways to generate passwords, do share it here.

A Fool Proof Way To Remember Thousands Of Passwords Effortlessly originally published on Make Tech Easier (RSS)