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Stephen Howes, Founder & CTO GrIDsure, comments on the Gawker Media and Twitter hack
December 2010 by Stephen Howes, Founder and CTO of GrIDsure
“Not only does this latest hack demonstrate how easy it is for users’ data to be compromised, it also shows how backward the industry is in the way it responds to such an event. The advice that comes out time and time again is ‘use different passwords for each online service you use’. Do they realistically expect us to remember a different password for each one? Whether it’s logging in to our growing list of email accounts, social networks, online banks and shopping sites, we simply don’t have the capacity or inclination to remember different passwords for each one, especially those, so called, ‘strong passwords’ with numbers, capitals and symbols in them. No wonder there is a ‘forgotten your password?’ feature on every login page!
“I hope that these high profile brands start to take more responsibility for their security, rather than expecting their users to become experts in protecting their online details. Of course users need to be savvy about where they share their data, but online services could use systems that already exist which would mean that following a hack like this, user details and passwords would be rendered as useless to the fraudster. Solutions such as software-based one-time passcode generators aren’t costly or difficult to implement – what’s needed is a mind shift from the online world to realise that these types of hacks will only become more common and the password is definitely past its use-by-date.”
