If you have listened to the news lately, and you are a user of Twitter you have heard about a phishing attack that happened a few days ago, and then shortly after that. The story goes, there was an employee of Twitter who had a weak password and the 18 year old hacker used a dictionary attack on some Twitter accounts and just so happened to crack the password. Once the hacker knew what account they actually hacked, he realized that he was able to take control of anyone's Twitter account.
So, Bill O'Reilly, Brittney Spears, Barrack Obama, just to name a few, all had their Twitter account passwords reset and then they were under control of the bad guy. To make a long story short, the Twitter account that was hacked had a password that was a word from a dictionary. It happened to be 'happiness'. Any word that can be found in the dictionary is considered a weak password. So here is my lesson on creating passwords.
Steps in creating a strong password are as follows.
1) Make a passphrase that is more than 10 characters.
2) Use a combination of upper and lower case letters as well as numbers and special characters.
3) Don't use the same password for multiple accounts, especially financial accounts.
So you want examples? What about your favorite vacation spot? So you love to travel to Rocky Mountain National Park. So you could create a password that incorporates special characters, numbers, and upper and lower case letters. How is this for a password. iL0v3therock1es. There is a 15 character password that isn't too hard to remember. You can use all kinds of things like this to create you a strong password.
Don't be a twit. Use strong passwords. Have a great Friday tomorrow and I'm planning on a fabulous weekend!
2 comments:
did the Twitter Admin change his password to "sadness" after he was hacked? haha... ok not funny
LOL, maybe she changed her password to 's@dn3$s'. And yes it is funny...if you don't work for Twitter.
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