Over the past weekend Mark Zuckerberg, tech giant, Facebook mogul and you-would-think tech genius, had his Twitter and Pinterest accounts hacked.
Of course, he’s an easy, convenient target – who wouldn’t want to boast about hacking Mark Zuckerberg’s accounts? Ironically, not much skill was needed to achieve this target. The Zuck made two classic mistakes.
His first was to use an incredibly simple and easy password consisting of only two unique characters, namely “dadada”. No caps, no special characters, no problem to hack. His second was using the same password for his Twitter and Pinterest accounts. Subsequently, hackers could access both accounts with minimum effort.
What we’re trying to say is, don’t feel bad if you use simple passwords because it’s easy to remember. Even Mark Zuckerberg does it. However, we would advise that, for your own safety, you start using unique, unusual passwords and not 123456 for all your accounts.
If it’s a challenge to remember different passwords for different accounts or if passwords with odd characters, capital letters and punctuation confuse you, consider using password management tools like KeePass and LastPass.
The good news is that Google is working on an alternative method for users to access their accounts on Android phones. It will be more secure and doesn’t use passwords.
Google recently announced Project Abacus, which will recognise a user by, what they call a Trust API – the way they type, their location, facial recognition, voice and other biometric markers. Google plans to complete work on this project by the end of this year.
[SOURCES: http://qz.com, http://www.nytimes.com]
