As seen on NPR.org
When 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords were stolen earlier this month, the revelation made Internet users think again about their ubiquitous words and phrases, and what they can do to make their online accounts a bit safer.
Shoppers in a suburban Seattle mall were asked recently about their password habits. Aaron Brown and Erin Gilmer have very different approaches.
"I try to keep as few as possible," Brown said.
And Gilmer said she has too many.
"They are totally weird. I just make up a different one for a different thing every time," Gilmer said.
"Usually it doesn't even make any sense. Most of the time I can't remember it later."
And therein lies the conundrum. If passwords are simple, they're not very secure. And when they're complicated, they're hard to remember. Perhaps it's not surprising that simplicity usually wins and hackers are happy about that.
"In the LinkedIn case, hackers stole data that LinkedIn had in a database somewhere that was supposed to be protected," says Eve Maler, a security and risk analyst at Forrester Research.
"What they ended up getting for their trouble was password hashes. They're kind of like encrypted versions of passwords — [it] looks like gobbledygook," Maler says.
In some cases cyberattackers can decipher gobbledygook and get actual passwords, especially if those passwords are not very robust.
So far, there is no evidence that happened in the LinkedIn case, but many Internet users have just one password for all of their accounts. So if the bad guys have your LinkedIn password, they may also have the password for your online banking.
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