The Problem with Passwords Love 'em or hate 'em, our digital world is full of passwords. While this feels like a plague unique to the modern digital era, if you think back you'll realize that they've always been there. We used to have ATM PINs, locker combinations, and even secret whisperings to get our hooch in the local speakeasy. And in that time, they haven't changed that much! They're still strings of characters, words, numbers, and hieroglyphs that get you past a security checkpoint of some kind. The major difference is that now, with brute force password guessing programs and…
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You may have seen over the last few days reports of MySpace username and password combinations for sale on hacker spaces. MySpace was breached, and a possible 360 million accounts with 427 million passwords could have been stolen. Yes, MySpace has long since been dominated by almost all other social networks that you can think of today. So who cares? You should. The first topic applies directly to the user - password reuse. We have talked about this numerous times in previous blogs, and the point still stands. The odds are favorable that either you or your coworkers have/had an account with MySpace.…
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We have written a few times in the past about some password etiquette, or how to create an effective password. But there is still more to a password than just creating a complex entry and moving on. A complex password goes out the window if your account credentials are stolen from a website and the attack went unnoticed. Luckily, there is still something we can do about this - passwords should be changed regularly. Something to consider -- even if your password is encrypted everywhere you store it, that doesn't mean it cannot be cracked. In time, all encryption mechanisms…
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In honor of National Cyber Security Awareness Month this article is going to talk about how you can easily mitigate cyber risks to your work and personal accounts by simply creating and managing good passwords. We as users must remember that we are the biggest problem. But with a few small changes to our habits, we can make it better. In a previous post we talked about how to mitigate account exposure from a hack by using good passwords. And don't reuse them. Reusing your password means that if one of your accounts has been compromised then all of your…
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A few weeks ago I posted an article about password vigilance and why it's important to maintain a healthy portfolio of different and complex passwords for your various accounts. That way if one system was hacked and usernames/passwords were stolen then only that system's data would be at risk. In the event of a compromised password you can easily change it and not worry about other accounts that perhaps share that same username. Simply update the account and your password manager. Case closed. Move on. I also mentioned that you should use two factor authentication if an application offers it.…
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