Ah, passwords. They’re our protectors. Our safety blankets. They’re good and we love them. Sorta.
As we all know, nearly everything we do nowadays—from playing games to checking our office desktops to downloading cellphone apps to paying bills to tweeting our Twitter peeps—is a big pile of constantly flowing data that’s buzzing around in this electronic netherworld called the Internet. And whether you want to think of your data as stuff nestled in some fluffy “cloud” or a matrix of zeros and ones, the truth is it’s all generally connected to your wallet in some way and must be protected.
And that’s where our buddy the password comes into play. Or should I say, passwords. Hey, we all know by now that if you’re using the same WhoLovesYaBaby23 password for everything, well, somebody’s gonna be buying speed boats and pet llamas with your life’s savings in no time. Identity theft is rampant and the thieves are getting more sophisticated by the second.
Fraudsters are using a variety of techniques to pinpoint the names of pets and family members you might use as your entry codes. Of course, your Facebook account—that lists everything from your mom’s middle name to your shoe size—can be very helpful with that. And then there are malware programs that sneak in from all directions. Attack programs, like a “dictionary attack,” even automatically run through all the words in the dictionary in several languages to hopefully land on your word key. And if you think substituting the number “4” for the letter “A” in “P4SSWORD” is fooling them, M4RY, well, think again.
I was reading a PC World article that essentially pointed out that we’re not very good at this password stuff. The article looks to a security software developing firm called Splashdata that put out its annual list of the most common passwords on the Internet. And it turns out, “password,” “123456,” and “12345678” are the three most popular, in that order. Look familiar? They list the top 25 most used with warnings to be a little more careful. Oh, and how did they figure out that list of most commonly used gatekeepers? They got them from online hackers.
Of course, once you figure out a really tough lock-up code—like “Pn3L!x8@H”—well, then there’s the problem of remembering it. After all, you can’t write passwords down or somebody can spot it. And the savvy hackers will be checking for a password list in your computer or cellphone as their first line of attack. (Here’s a Wired article that might give you some help.)
Orwell’s classic 1984 told us that the future would be all about desperately bearing up under the totalitarian gaze of an ever-watchful Big Brother. But reality is a much starker thing. In this future we have to bear up under the weight of trying to create and desperately remember nineteen hundred and eighty-four gazillion passwords.
Am I depressing you? Sorry. But that’s the nature of our brave new world—identity thieves, depression and … politics. It makes me wanna just change all my passwords to ARGGH! (Or maybe 4RGGH! would be safer.)
Recent Comments