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CybAlert Social Media Alerts and Solutions

When it was discovered that a Russian hacker posted 6.4 million passwords on a board, and that some of the passwords were found to be associated to LinkedIn accounts, it became quite apparent that a social community that boasts to have the highest earning and highest educated user base failed to encourage it's community to adopt authentication methods that would be parallel with the users' sophistication.

It became quite clear that social media participants hold the communities entirely responsible for securing the profiles the users so generously endorse to the social community operators.

Of the 6.4 million passwords... 300,000 passwords were quickly deciphered. One wonders what intellectual powerhouse can decipher encrypted passwords so quickly ?

Well actually it's really not the skillset of the technologist... it's the lack of interest of the community member to create a minimally secure password.

The first batch of password to be deciphered were very difficult passwords like "password" and "Password" and "PASSWORD."

Oh it gets better... in the first 300,000 passwords we had hard to decipher passwords like "123456" and "qwertyui" and "abcdefgh" and "zxcvbnm,"

Then of course we have the classics... "admin" and "0000" and "wxyz" and of course [7 digit phone numbers]

The point of this is not intended to be an indictment of the community or the user members.

Afterall, the community operator has to balance the 'ease of use' with attracting and retaining members. The more difficult the authentication, the less frequently will the members login...

Then there is the community member/user.. yes, the ones that use "wxyz" and "password"... these members are simply a part of a complex population that is required to remember more and more authentication phrases and passwords... and it's getting virtually impossible...

Some sites require a minimum of 8... some require at least one uppercase character... and a numeric, some sites require an uppercase character a numeric and a symbol, and just as one would think its under control, a site requires to begin with a character and not a numeric.

And every site is structured as though the user visits multiple times a day... and the user somehow remembers the unique password format.

It's understandable that users elect to use very simple passwords as often as possible to just deal with the dozens of logins and passwords required in today's environment.

And let's not forget the sites and work related environments that require a change in password every 30-60-90 days.

There is no cure for all this... It's a brave new world of authentication. In 10 years authentication evolved from a commonly accepted password as a 4 digit number to complex formats.

CybAlert can only offer a series of hints of how to foil the attempts of the bad people to seize passwords...

Safe passwords hint #1