Red Security

Passwords, they are are the proverbial guards, the last line of defense,.. other than your firewall. They are assigned the difficult job of protecting your email, your bank account, the files on your hard-drive, and your player accounts for any video games you might play. They protect a lot of things. They come in many forms; small, long, hard to break, and even so easy to ax you wonder whether or not human evolution is bringing back its "stupid genes."

Long gone are the days where you could try and guess a person's password by the various items on or near the system. Almost everything is done electronically, with the exception of skimmers and planting that RaPi system somewhere in the mall so you can piggyback on their free WiFi. You need to sneak into systems, quietly make your way through them, until you reach that chest of booty you so tentatively desire. Passwords are the basic grunts of that rat maze, and they die so loyally in battle when they are presented as [password] [1234567890] [password123] the list goes on. Basically, it doesn't take long for a new pass-security trend to make its way down the ladder, and then the bad guys learn a way around it, and then we need to change it again. The tug of war, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaking of password problems, a tech company by the name of Chegg had to reset the passwords of all 40 million of its customers after discovering a data breach back in April. After trying to quietly investigate the matter, they later came out and stated that:

“The Company understands that the information that may have been obtained could include a Chegg user’s name, email address, shipping address, Chegg username, and hashed Chegg password.”

With that said, they did state that there was no breach of any financial records.

Also in the matter of passwords, Microsoft is taking a deep dive into removing them completely, from Office 365 and Windows 10 Azure. They plan to replace with an automatic authentication app. This is supposed to help prevent phishing attacks and provide faster login codes. I guess we will see how well this pans out for them.

All in all, that took longer than it should have... but I need to get to bed... or stay up, not sure.

From Russia with love...

----Sh7nk-Z0id

Mad-Architect