Internet Insider – Password Protection

Michael Pochron

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Internet Insider - Password Protection

With technology getting easier to use by the day, this also includes the more sinister technology such as hacking and password breaching. Passwords are one of, if not the most important things in the online world nowadays and losing one or even getting an account hacked can lead to complete disaster.

Before the lesson starts, it is critical to know that ninety percent of any password breaches is not done by humans but rather by machines. These machines go through dictionaries and thesauruses starting with personal information like first and last names then eventually goes through every single word and number. This is called brute forcing and is the most used way to acquire a person’s password and personal information.

One other widely used way to acquire a person’s account is through the use of cookie manipulation and no that doesn’t mean messing with your friend’s cookies. Cookies are little packets of information that a website can use to track the person using it and then can use that information for determining the size of a server or to get revenue from ads. However these can be manipulated to have it record other kinds of data such as passwords or credit card information and send it back to the hacker rather than the company. One of the most common is called a key logger and it does exactly what it sounds like, log any key press and what order they were in.
Now the question pops up about how to defend yourself from these from these machines and luckily for everyone, I have the answer. There are websites such as randompasswordgenerator.org that create random password that can be modified  to meet certain settings. The thing is that users won’t remember their thirty two character passwords, however they can just put the password on a document to copy paste and make sure to keep it organized by putting the website next to the password.. An example of how a password would look like would be: email – 3c]U23. This way is also extremely secure because it bypasses any kind of cookie manipulator or key logger because users are not typing in their password but rather are copy pasting them from a secure document.