How a Hacker Cracked a CNN Correspondent’s Passwords
What’s Wrong with LoginsEverything!!!
User ID & Password Authentication
If you make your password easy to remember, then it will be easily hacked, and vice versa, if you make it hard to hack, it will be hard to remember.
If you use the same password everywhere, then you will significantly increase your probability to be hacked because your Personal Information would be sprinkled everywhere, but if you use a different password for every website, then you will have difficulty to remember them all.
If you change your passwords often as you are advised to do, then you will have hard time remembering them all, but if you don’t change your passwords often, then you increase your probability to be hacked.
If you use Keychains to remember all your passwords, and if you are hacked, then all the websites that you have signed up to will be compromised.
If you use your browser cookies to automatically log in to any website, then you might as well not have a password at all.
Even though Password Managers are temporary band-aids, they do mitigate some vulnerabilities and offer some warnings and alerts of potential data leaks, breaches, and attacks. However, they present the following risks:
Vulnerable centralized database where the passwords are stored
Crash of the application itself which causes users not to be able to log in.
Dependency of the vendor’s support.
Reliability of the vendor of the application who may go out of business.
What’s Wrong with LoginsEverything!!!
The User ID & Password Authentication offers two methods:
Even though large websites have stronger defenses than the great majority of websites, however, they are very high target to hackers who routinely attack them. Just last week, Facebook admitted that more than 1 million accounts have been hacked. The largest hack was from 2013 to 2016 when 3 billion Yahoo! accounts were hacked. So, the probability for your Facebook, Google, Twitter, or LinkedIn account to be hacked some day is highly likely, if not already.
We got tricked by some social media firms in believing their slogans like “Do No Evil”, only to then realize that they were all along THE evil with their tracking and tracing capability that they sneakily hidden from us. Second to cookies, social logins are the biggest threat to our privacy that led to the creation of the “Surveillance Economy” that exploits Residual Data and Derivative Data which we leave behind while surfing the web that tech firms pick up as the raw material to package us as their product for sale to their customers – the advertisers.