binary passwords lol, I like it

 

Interestingly, the biggest fault in these "how secure is your password" calculations is they assume people know how LONG your password is. I could have a password of "." and it's just as secure as a hundred letter chain simply because it is still just 1 possible combination, just as "YoudOnTspEllT3hasT3hunlessYouusedToSayTehLots!!!1!!1!" is just one combination. if every brute forcer was going to start with every 1 letter combination first then yes it's very bad, but do they start with 1 because it's easy? do they start with 5 because it's common? It's not only about the security of your password, but of all passwords possible.

 

As for your pc security: don't get complacent thinking you are secure. I run 2 (good) antispywares and a decent antivirus, do regular manual checks in key locations, registry and process checks, and I knew more about computers 15 years ago than most will know in their lives. Even I get something breaking through sometimes, it just means I'm much better equipped to deal with it before it becomes a problem. The last 2 major ones i had, believe it or not, came in through microsoft update (they arent 100% secure either and they have more resources than me), and being a microsoft product when the antispywares tried to stop it the windows defender decided that the antispywares were a threat and killed them. I was lucky enough to notice it real time (first thing I did was pull out the network cable and go standalone) and I was lucky to be able to fight it off but it does happen. I had a friend who was less lucky: swore blindly his Norton 360 said he was clean. After much bullying and getting some antispywares that were actually worth their binary he turned out to have 74 different spywares. Never trust a single antispyware fully: there are more people writting malicious code than are writing defensive code. In this age where we have increasingly powerful PCs (except for you laptop users) it is worth the tiny performance impact to have that extra layer of protection

 

I had spyware come through a windows update as well. Luckily, most of the programs that target RS are very rudimentary. It's fairly hard to be compromised.

yeah, this wasnt something targetting rs. This actually locked my our of task manager, registry, and most of explorer, disabled all security and tried to start copying my files.

 

Step 1 was pull the network cable out. Step 2 was use hijack this to get registry access back, and then it was a fight between me deleteing it and it trying to rewrite itself in. In the end it took 4 days solid to recover...and i was in a bad mood.

 

Always have a backup. a registry entry can cut your access to regedit, but there are some tools that let you recover that.