45 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
  2. Nov 2023
    1. It’s an unfortunate fact that many people use the same credentials to log into different accounts. This password practice is a big part of what enables account takeovers, as it increases the likelihood that hackers can use compromised credentials to access sensitive information across accounts.
  3. Apr 2023
  4. Mar 2023
  5. Aug 2022
  6. May 2022
    1. Many companies send our passwords via email. Whether these emails come from our IT department, a colleague, a SaaS solution or elsewhere, it's not a good idea to send and receive passwords via email.

      Send passwords via email? A bad idea!

      Many companies send our passwords via email. Whether these emails come from our IT department, a colleague, a SaaS solution or elsewhere, it's not a good idea to send and receive passwords via email.

  7. Nov 2021
  8. Sep 2021
  9. Aug 2021
    1. The confession-book, I suppose, has disappeared. It is twenty years since I have seen one. As a boy I told some inquisitive owner what was my favourite food (porridge, I fancy), my favourite hero in real life and in fiction, my favourite virtue in woman, and so forth.

      The form of some of these questions in confession albums is similar to modern day security questions asked by banks and personal accounts as a sort of personal password or shibboleth.

  10. Mar 2021
  11. Apr 2020
    1. Take a moment to consider the alternative. No, not the IT department's fantasy world, that never-gonna-happen scenario where you create a strong, unique password for every account, memorize each one, and refresh them every few months. We both know it's not like that. The reality is that in your attempts to handle all those passwords yourself, you will commit the cardinal sin of reusing some. That is actually far more risky than using a password manager. If a single site that uses this password falls, every account that uses it is compromised.
    1. Password reuse is a serious problem because of the many password leaks that occur each year, even on large websites. When your password leaks, malicious individuals have an email address, username, and password combination they can try on other websites. If you use the same login information everywhere, a leak at one website could give people access to all your accounts. If someone gains access to your email account in this way, they could use password-reset links to access other websites, like your online banking or PayPal account.
    1. "Changing your password is definitely the right start," Tyler Carbone, chief strategy officer at secure provider Terbium Labs said. "The other thing users need to remember is that with this password exposed, it cannot be trusted for any other services either, so they need to make sure they aren't reusing it."
    1. Google figures that since it has a big (encrypted) database of all your passwords, it might as well compare them against a 4-billion-strong public list of compromised usernames and passwords that have been exposed in innumerable security breaches over the years. Any time Google hits a match, it notifies you that a specific set of credentials is public and unsafe and that you should probably change the password.
    1. "If someone knows your old passwords, they can catch onto your system. If you're in the habit of inventing passwords with the name of a place you've lived and the zip code, for example, they could find out where I have lived in the past by mining my Facebook posts or something."Indeed, browsing through third-party password breaches offers glimpses into the things people hold dear — names of spouses and children, prayers, and favorite places or football teams. The passwords may no longer be valid, but that window into people's secret thoughts remains open.
    2. Single-factor authentication based on "something you know" (e.g., a password) is no longer an acceptable best practice. "I'm pretty well convinced passwords are a horrible system," Professor Douglas W. Jones of the University of Iowa, says
    1. There is MiniKeePass on the iOS App Store, but I'm not sure if I trust it not to make off with my data. Also, syncing between my PC and the app would be a pain. (1Password has local WiFi sync) There is also KeeFox for Firefox integration, but I'm not sure if I trust that either. In short, I trust KeePass itself, but I'm not sure if I can trust the third-party developers of the mobile app and browser extension.
    1. In 2017 NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) as part of their digital identity guidelines recommended that user passwords are checked against existing public breaches of data. The idea is that if a password has appeared in a data breach before then it is deemed compromised and should not be used. Of course, the recommendations include the use of two factor authentication to protect user accounts too.
  12. Mar 2020
  13. Apr 2019