When networks became established in the companies, there was soon a desire to connect to the internal network from outside. The main reason was that you could access its resources in this way. For example, field staff wanted to access files stored on the internal file server. Of course, it would have been a possible way to make the server accessible from outside. It is obvious, however, that this might not be the optimal solution from a safety point of view (not that this has not been done anyway and probably is still being done). It is better to connect to the internal network from the outside and then become a part of it. VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) were introduced for this purpose. The employee then logs on to an externally accessible server with a specific protocol and then can work on it as if he were […]

The average German internet user has 15 different accounts. Some of them he created because he wanted to, others he was forced to create more or less. And every single one of them is normally protected by a password. Of course, the user is lazy and therefore he is using every time the same password. At least since the major security breaches at Yahoo, LinkedIn and Tumblr you see what are the consequences. The leaked email-password combinations were used to try them at others services on a large scale and with an astonished high hit ratio accounts could be compromised. Obviously, the question is how can this be prevented best. Additionally, there are two basic conditions that do not make this easier. For one thing, more and more services insist that the password of the users has to follow specific rules (special characters, numbers, minimum length, …).  […]