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That's because security techs are in the room, watching it 24/7, and they unlock the safe whenever they see that it's you. Imagine a miracle safe for your bedroom: It doesn't need a key or a password. If the whole system is designed to keep data secret, users will hardly stand for a security regime that shreds their privacy in the process. #MICROSOFT WORD LOCKED FOR EDITING CANNOT FREAKING SAVE PASSWORD#The hacker's goal: resetting the password and taking over the account. The following is from a January 2012 live chat between Apple online support and a hacker posing as Brian-a real Apple customer. ![]() Better security is easy if you're willing to greatly inconvenience users, but that's not a workable compromise. Requiring you to remember a 256-character hexadecimal password might keep your data safe, but you're no more likely to get into your account than anyone else. The first is convenience: The most secure system isn't any good if it's a total pain to access. It's the Band-Aid that's now being washed away in a river of blood.Įvery security framework needs to make two major trade-offs to function in the real world. It's the compromise that growing web companies came up with to keep people signing up and entrusting data to their sites. We stashed our photos, our documents, our data in the cloud.Įventually, as the number of epic hacks increased, we started to lean on a curious psychological crutch: the notion of the "strong" password. We began banking in the cloud, tracking our finances in the cloud, and doing our taxes in the cloud. Web-based email was the gateway to a new slate of cloud apps. This practice persisted even as the number of accounts-the number of failure points-grew exponentially. Email addresses morphed into a sort of universal login, serving as our username just about everywhere. Because almost no personal information was in the cloud-the cloud was barely a wisp at that point-there was little payoff for breaking into an individual's accounts the serious hackers were still going after big corporate systems. Our passwords were limited to a handful of applications: an ISP for email and maybe an ecommerce site or two. This was due largely to how little data they actually needed to protect. After that, he got as much time as he wanted.ĭuring the formative years of the web, as we all went online, passwords worked pretty well. It only took until 1962 when a PhD student named Allan Scherr, wanting more than his four-hour allotment, defeated the login with a simple hack: He located the file containing the passwords and printed out all of them. ![]() To limit the time any one user could spend on the system, CTSS used a login to ration access. The first computers to use passwords were likely those in MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System, developed in 1961. ![]() Employing this ruse, the undermatched Syracusans decimated the invaders, and when the sun rose, their cavalry mopped up the rest. At times when the Greeks looked too formidable, the watchword allowed their opponents to pose as allies. #MICROSOFT WORD LOCKED FOR EDITING CANNOT FREAKING SAVE CODE#The Syracusans picked up on the code and passed it quietly through their ranks. Syracusae, a key ally of Sparta, seemed sure to fall.īut during a chaotic nighttime battle at Epipole, Demosthenes' forces were scattered, and while attempting to regroup they began calling out their watchword, a prearranged term that would identify soldiers as friendly. In 413 BC, at the height of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian general Demosthenes landed in Sicily with 5,000 soldiers to assist in the attack on Syracusae. And for as long as they've existed, people have been breaking them. And to delay me from getting it back, they used my Apple account to wipe every one of my devices, my iPhone and iPad and MacBook, deleting all my messages and documents and every picture I'd ever taken of my 18-month-old daughter. They really just wanted my Twitter handle: As a three-letter username, it's considered prestigious. My Apple, Twitter, and Gmail passwords were all robust-seven, 10, and 19 characters, respectively, all alphanumeric, some with symbols thrown in as well-but the three accounts were linked, so once the hackers had conned their way into one, they had them all. This summer, hackers destroyed my entire digital life in the span of an hour. All a hacker has to do is use personal information that's publicly available on one service to gain entry into another. Thanks to an explosion of personal information being stored in the cloud, tricking customer service agents into resetting passwords has never been easier. The way we daisy-chain accounts, with our email address doubling as a universal username, creates a single point of failure that can be exploited with devastating results. Leaks and dumps-hackers breaking into computer systems and releasing lists of usernames and passwords on the open web-are now regular occurrences. ![]()
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