Since the turn of the century, technological advances have created another world that all of us participate daily. However, we take certain precautions to guard ourselves from harm. We have passwords to act as our shield on the internet. But exactly how safe are these passwords of ours? Whenever we see networks hacked, those companies always blame the fact that the passwords we set for ourselves were worthy of a 1st grade computer genius. The latest in line of these victims was Henry Burris, quarterback of the Calgary Stampeders, who had his Twitter Account hacked. The hackers proceeded to display provocative comments posing as Burris.
All computer personnel experts recommend that we have a different password for every single website we use. However, this proves to be a major inconvenience, considering we need passwords to follow Obama’s Twitter account, listen to music, and see what our friends are up to. On an another note a software engineer from Google recommends that we should keep our passwords locked up in a fire safe for ultimate security; a very paranoid idea perhaps, but one which is bound to be safe. However remembering fifty different passwords or opening a fire safe every day just to partake in the virtual world created to make our lives easier seems redundant.
Those computer personal experts I mentioned earlier who develop security for websites would love for all of us to change our password every six months, mix up the capitalization of the letters and throw in a few Greek letters for good measure. According to Gibson Research Corporation, an internet security group’s password generator, an appropriate password would be:
E8JszrZFPqda113hyX1Ey57hofiDAnTR0vnqkFDk0qdJ9mpwgi6crW7QZHzLAzC
If these were the precautions which need to be taken, I think a more viable solution would be to simply buff up the security on websites and not have computer hackers tear them apart. Kevin Mitnik, who at a time was the world’s most wanted hacker (who now works at a computer counsulting firm) had this to say in an interview with Time Magazine: “I think it goes back to my days in high school. In computer class, the first assignment was to write a program to print the first 100 fibonacci numbers. Instead, I wrote a program that would steal passwords of students. My teacher gave me an A.” Is the education we have given to hackers at a young age the problem, or is hacking just an expression of a criminal activity on another world, a virtual one? Whatever the issue is, the internet is no longer the information haven of old, instead it has turned to a place where we each must protect ourselves. And although we can do that ourselves to a certain degree, companies need to take a bigger part in protecting their users identity.
Just like the government protects it’s civilians, on the virtual world computer networks need to do the same. What we see today are the hackers being one step ahead of the security, when ideally we should be striving to turn that relationship around. The internet is a place of productivity and entertainment, and not a hazardous world, hopefully that day will come.