If you remember the password to enter the mail, on Netflix or Amazon, you are doing something wrong. It means that you have created a password that is easy to remember: the name of the mother, the cat, the holidays or the favorite team. They will be the first passwords that an attacker will use to access one of the services you use to work or have fun for you. And it will do so after reading your Facebook and LinkedIn profile, looking for the right association. But by now we should all know. Instead it seems that things are not like that at all. Several researches have shown that users use passwords that are too easy to hack and for this reason, World Password Day is celebrated on May 6th. Born from the idea of a computer security researcher, Mark Burnett, aims to remind everyone of the importance of a secure password. One? Maybe. Each of us must have at least 10 different passwords for e-mail, video streaming, the school register and other services and so we always end up using the same one which, once compromised, allows us to pierce them all.
Cybercrime is the third largest economy in the world. “10 million damage from the second”
by Arthur of Corinth
You will say: but I have nothing to hide! Mistaken. We all have secrets big and small that we hide with passwords, and for cybercriminals, a jealous husband, an unfair competitor, or a private investigator, it can be easy to find the hole in our life to slip into. Insecure passwords actually protect an increasingly important set of personal data, including “metadata” (where, how, with whom, with what tool, what time I communicated). Those who feel smart use the trick of “disguising” passwords by replacing letters with numbers or special symbols like “HacK3r $” but thanks to the available computing power and entire online vocabularies that translate them, they are still a bad idea. Like using famous Latin phrases, such as “Lex dura lex sed lex”, the most used by lawyers.
World Password Day, 10 tips to protect your emails
by SIMONE COSIMI
So let’s start with a fact: according to Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report, the81% of cyber breaches go through credential theft. Put simply, this means that if the majority of us were equipped with secure passwords, the number of cyberattacks in the world would suffer a drastic decline. In fact, several surveys have shown that out of one billion credentials analyzed, about seven million were ‘123456’, and then the usual ‘passwords’, ‘dragon’, and ‘Ronaldo’. In short, the world day of passwords is an important anniversary given that every year the number of databreaches increases, massive data breaches, including passwords, which generate identity theft and computer scams that really affect everyone. Despite this, passwords are considered as something boring, which requires attention and effort, a nuisance in the rush to access a site, chat freely, send a document. This is why we take dangerous shortcuts, such as using the same password for multiple services or choosing passwords that are simple and easy to memorize and not change them after a data breach. According to Bitdefender, 66% of people do not consider changing passwords after learning of major data breaches, and more than half have not changed their passwords in the past 12 months. But the problem isn’t just for ordinary users. According to Panda Security, 42% of companies rely on notes for password management; 59% to human memory to manage passwords; 62% say they are not taking the necessary steps to adequately protect mobile data
Dark web: this is how much credit cards, identity, PayPal cost in the illegal market
by Simone Cosimi
Password to protect privacy
So how do you choose a good password and how do you protect yourself? Well, in the meantime updating passwords that are too weak. The longer, complex and nonsensical passwords are, the harder they will be for an attacker to crack. Then you have to protect smartphones, tablets and computers with a pin, password or biometric code. Finally adopt behaviorthe safe. Whenever we enter our credentials online we are potentially vulnerable: both the people close to us and the cameras can see the passwords entered.
In detail here is what you should do:
- Choose a password (or passphrase) greater than 12 characters which takes 62 trillion times longer to hack than a 6-character password.
- To create a strong password you need to use numbers, letters, punctuation, upper and lower case.
- Never use personal information (nicknames, names of children and players) for the password, nor phrases and references from famous songs and films
- Never use the same password for multiple digital services.
- It is not recommended to write the password on sheets, files or notebooks or try to memorize them, better to be able to regenerate it every time according to a code known only to us, a complex calculation, an abstruse question.
- Use two or three-factor authentication as we do with the bank: to access the current account, an ID, a password and a One Time Password are used (i.e. a password that can be used only once generated ad hoc) that comes to us via app or phone.
- Use a password manager to store and manage all of your credentials. It is a free or paid software that acts as a convenient “safe”. It opens and takes the key you need at that moment automatically.
- If possible, use biometric recognition systems such as fingerprint, iris or face identification.
TikTok: security breach, risk of identity theft and phishing for millions of profiles. Gubiani: “Digital education is needed”
by Tiziano Toniutti
A world without a password
It will take some time to create a world without a password and still having a good one helps us in case something goes wrong. For Cisco, the exponential growth of passwords is a phenomenon that generates additional costs and management difficulties. Requests for lost passwords and incomplete logins often constitute the majority of requests to help desks and customer care, resulting in a loss of productivity and increased support costs for the business. For this it has announced a passwordless authentication mode so that users can access cloud applications via a security key or through biometric recognition. But there are even more innovative solutions such as those of the Italian ToothPic. The Turin start-up has invented a solution to transform every smartphone into a secure key for online authentication, taking advantage of the hidden and involuntary signature that each camera leaves. The system keeps the keys of the device in use by encrypting them with a secret code extracted from a hardware feature of the device itself: the unique and unrepeatable manufacturing imperfections of the photographic sensors that make each device different from any other ever produced.
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