All these information leads to one single question. Have we not learned our lessons yet? Password security is not something that is new. Since the advent of cyber networks, scientists and computer geeks equally are delving in developing software security weapons to protect data from being stolen. However the American strategy towards cyber security has changed since the wide scale attacks on federal documents and the much recent security data theft published in the whistleblower website Wikileaks.
There are several known steps that anyone could follow in order to protect their password. For example a password of at least ten characters long can be pretty hard to crack. According to analysts it will take at least 20 years for someone to crack it. The dangers of being exposed to password theft are many. LulzSec, a hacker community said that it gained access to personal information of Sony Customers. They said that they had access to more than 1 million accounts and where able to get names, home addresses and passwords. The information was stored in text form.
Another recent attack that shook the cyber world is the much recent security breach that exposed financial data of whopping 360,000 personal accounts in Citibank. The company said that the reason for the huge level of security breach is due to the rising number of card holders. There are around 23 million card holders associated with Citibank. Though the bank agents said that they have taken up enhanced measures to improve security, the kind of damage it exposed is considerably significant.
However, websites and companies have taken serious steps to provide password security. The double step authentication for Gmail account creation is a recent step towards advanced security. For account creation people are required to fill in the user name and password. The procedure takes users to a verification page. A six digit code should be entered. The verification code will be later sent to the user’s phone through short message service. Some banks have also turned to two factor authentication. Vasco Data Security issues tokens as an effort to improve security within the organization. The security code generates pass codes that can be used for safe online banking.
The much recent data leak of various US diplomatic cables has shown how deteriorating are our efforts towards online security. A tangible measure will be to limit the access to such documents. Information should be classified. You cannot give access to everyone the information that is strictly confidential. However, there should also be a method to provide information in a systematic manner. We live in an information savvy environment. It would be really hard to suppress it much longer than a considerable period of time. In order to prevent frequent attack from crackers, sensible data should be encrypted and protected using secret codes and passwords.
Author Byline: Ryan S. Gonzales writes for the networking courses blog. It's a non profits site he utilizes to share information about computer system networking certification. He is also a reviewer of the sqlcertification.net blog to assist folks get SQL training.
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