LinkedIn.com’s recent announcement that its user passwords had been hacked sent shivers through the World Wide Web community. Apparently, a "Russian" hacker had broken into LinkedIn’s database and posted information related to passwords of 6.5 million users. Granted, the information in a LinkedIn account is fairly benign. This action, however, has far-reaching implications for all "netizens."
We won’t go into the technical details of what happened, but the fact of the matter is that one of the largest websites in the world (market cap of more than $10 billion) was vulnerable to such a breach. What does that say for other, smaller websites?
Techies debate and criticize the security policies and procedures employed by LinkedIn, but we’ve seen even the most secure websites subject to hacking in the past.
The bottom line is that even the most trustworthy sites can’t be trusted. Or, put more accurately, even the most trustworthy sites can be hacked. In the past, the biggest targets were those sites that housed financial information, or information that could be used for financial gain. This episode is actually more far reaching, because many other websites, like LinkedIn, use email addresses as login names, and many folks use the same passwords across all the websites they patronize.
Without a doubt, this type of hacking will happen again.
The solution, in a nutshell, is for folks to be smarter about how they use the Internet. First, change ALL of your passwords on a regular basis, at least every 30 days. While this sounds like a pain in the okole, it’s really not that hard to do. Most folks frequent less than a dozen sites that require logins. This is a 30-minute exercise for even the worst typists. That’s an average of one minute per day per month.
Further, don’t use the same password for all your sites. Again, this is a pain, but a necessary one. Don’t worry too much about forgetting your passwords. Nowadays, virtually every website out there has some form of an automated password recovery system.
Many experts call for people to use so-called "strong" passwords. A strong password includes more than eight characters, and a variety of character types (numbers, letters, special characters). While strong passwords can be hacked, they are more difficult to break than standard passwords. So let the hackers break someone else’s password as opposed to yours. Remember, you don’t have to swim faster than the shark, you just have swim faster than the other folks in the water.
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John Agsalud is an IT expert with more than 20 years of information technology experience in Hawaii and around the world. Reach him at johnagsalud@yahoo.com.
