Contributor: Tech Mistress is not a so young ‘eccentric’, tech loving lady. She likes to share information in funny and witty ways, to inform but yet motivate. You can follow her on twitter – @AbiikeBlogger, and check out her blog – Mumuocrats.
I have always had issues with my passwords, I always never seem to remember all of them, so to make things easy for me I have just one password for every site on cyberspace. It has solved a few problems but created a new one, my password is probably too easy because I find it hard to remember digits and numbers in whatever pattern, you don’t think an FBI code cracker to get at my password. I am positive there are millions of people out there with this same problem I have.
According to the 2012 Global security report by Trustwave, ‘Password1? has become the most common password used in business. Password1 is so common because it satisfies the setting, meaning it has a capital letter, a number, and the right amount of characters to meet the requirements for basic password security. This isn’t good news in the progressively increasing hostile web environment. There is an alarming list of hacking incidents around the world with ANONYMOUS leading the pack:
- Customer records remained a valuable target for attackers, making up 89 percent of breached data investigated.
- For the second year, the food and beverage industry made up the highest percentage of investigations at nearly 44 percent.
- Industries with franchise models are the new cyber targets: more than a third of 2011 investigations occurred in a franchise business.
- In 76 percent of incident response investigations, a third party responsible for system support, development and/or maintenance of business environments introduced the security deficiencies.
- Law enforcement detected more breaches in 2011—up from 7 percent in 2010 to 33 percent in 2011.
- Data harvesting techniques continued to target data “intransit” within victim environments showing up in 62.5 percent of 2011 investigations.
- Anti-virus detected less than 12 percent of the targeted malware samples collected during 2011 investigations.
- For Web-based attacks, SQL injection remains the number one attack method for the fourth year in a row.
How do we compromise ourselves? we set our usernames as passwords (some sites detect the anomaly now), by also adding numerically predictable changes to passwords, ie – 1234, or merely capitalizing the first letter of a password, and then adding an exclamation point to the end. It is recommended that passwords to be changed frequently, with greater complexity, and also in the necessity of multiple passwords we tend to write down passwords and leave them in places where they can be seen, mainly sitting on the computer they are set to protect.
So, what is your password?
