News this week that Russian hackers have stolen 1.2 billion passwords makes me want to throw up my hands in resignation and change all my passwords back to “password.”
A security expert quoted in the New York Times suggests that we might protect ourselves from this new level of hackery by creating an anagram from a sentence “using symbols and numbers to make it more complicated. For example, the sentence One time in class I ate some glue could become 1TiC!AsG.”
Someday, computer innovators tell us, passwords may be replaced by optical recognition or a system that can detect each person’s unique pattern of touch on the keyboard. Let’s hope that happens sooner rather than later, but in the meantime, I’m afraid, the bad guys have won. There is simply no way that we can keep in our heads the new and improved super-safe passwords that would provide immunity from identity thieves.
via The lost art of passwords: What we lost when hackers conquered the Internet – Salon.com.