Securing Safety

I’m sure many of you have read about the recent Twitter security breach, infamously dubbed on the web as “Twittergate”. Many articles were written afterwards about how simple it was for the hacker to breach the Twitter employee’s account and gain access to sensitive information. From the readings, it was clear that the victim had a tendency to use the same password for all of their accounts (i.e., email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). This is a typical mistake that’s made but it’s understandable as to why people do use this method. Let’s face it, we have so many different logins for all of our activities, ranging from email to Facebook to online banking. It can get hard to remember all of those passwords and not many people are too keen on writing them down. What they do is prefer to use one password that they know they’ll remember (i.e., spouse’s name, child’s birthday, etc.) and this can leave them extremely vulnerable.

I won’t go into the depths of online safety because I don’t have the merits to tell you the most advanced ways to protect yourself. I also won’t go into the obvious dos and don’ts (i.e., don’t leave your passwords lying around on your desk, etc.) because I feel that’s redundant. Besides, I know my readers are smarter than that ; ) However, I do want to mention a few things that hopefully may help you create a stronger password. At work, our passwords must have one upper case letter, one lower case letter, one number, and one special character. So for example, if you got married in Rome in 2001 and you will never forget that date (hopefully for both you and your spouse’s sake!) and you want to use that as your password because it’s something you will remember easily then use the tip I mentioned above. Instead of having a password like Rome2001, use the combination of different characters to make it difficult to guess your password. Something like r0Me200! would be much harder to guess than Rome2001.

Although these “tricky” passwords are much harder to crack than regular ones, they can still be cracked (for those that watched National Treasure, you’ll recall the password hack scene). If someone is really determined to commit a crime, they can easily have keylogging software installed on people’s computers who aren’t too savvy. Keylogging is nothing new and is one of the easiest ways to get your information hijacked. Most people aren’t smart enough to NOT click on certain links, thereby leaving them vulnerable to attacks. So even with the most difficult password to crack, you can still be compromised. So what then, is our savior on the web?

There’s a safer way to generate passwords rather than resorting to letters, numbers, or characters. The answer? Images. As brilliant as many of you think I am, I will not take credit as the pioneer of this concept. I read about a company a year ago (their name escapes me at the moment) who was working on this as a means to counter online identity theft. The concept is simple yet brilliant. When creating any kind of account, you would be presented with 9 images, 3 of them being your password. You could even load 3 of your own images to personalize it. So if my 3 images were a Ferrari Enzo, a Real Madrid team emblem, and a can of coke, then those would be my unique login. Since there is no typing, this is not vulnerable to keylogging. Also, these would appear on different parts of the screen for added security. The screenshot below shows how difficult it would be to hack into this account.



Of course the password is only as good as the person creating it. If I choose images of three things that are easily guessable then I’ve defeated the purpose. So if I’m a professed lover of soccer, ice cream, and Adidas and numerous people know this, then these wouldn’t be the best things to use as my password. The concept is to have a password that not even your spouse would be able to figure out.

With the amount of identity theft and fraud that goes on, both here in the States and internationally, I’m hoping that websites, namely those that carry confidential information (i.e., online banking and e-commerce), will adopt this sooner than later. Someone shouldn’t have to be worried about being a victim every time they make a purchase. By giving people a sense of security, the web can take on a whole new shape that can truly be magnitudes beyond what we’ve imagined.