Are usernames & passwords safe?
With the growing internet usage, any website or an application can be broken or hacked into with enough time & resources. At present our identity & personal information are the most important credentials that we often share with other websites like FaceBook, Gmail, Yahoo etc. How much we can trust & how long these websites can defend all possible attacks from external sources is a very big question now-a-days.
How Hackers play?
Intelligent brains often called as hackers are breaching thousands of customer accounts in various websites with less secure username/password & other confidential information. Whenever a user is creating an account in any website they tend to feel that there information is safe but in general it isn?t.
Everything isn’t Safe & Protected in Cyberspace
Present day scenario is allowing us to login with a username & password but it is impossible to protect these credentials since many websites use key loggers, viruses, batch files which often gets downloaded into our PC?s with a wrong click & thus jeopardizing our security. Everything is connected to one way or another in this cyberspace. If the Government agencies can intercept our day to day usage & activities over the web then why can?t others? Till date there?s no law that has been incorporated to safeguard our information on the internet but it needs to be implemented very soon irrespective of any size.
How to Construct your Username & Password?
Username & password aren?t easy to protect on the internet but there are some guidelines that everybody should consider while creating their accounts or sharing their information over other websites. They are as follows:-
- Must use at-least 6 to 20 characters for usernames with a combination of letters (a-z & A-Z), numbers & symbols. Spaces aren?t allowed & usernames are case sensitive. Please construct your username carefully since you?ll be unable to change it after registration.
- Must use minimum 6 to 20 characters for password with a combination of letters (a-z & A-Z), numbers & symbols. Special characters (~`!@#$%^&*()+=_-{}[]|:;???/<>,.) are allowed too.
- In some websites, it?ll ask for your email address as the username. It is suggested to use your secondary email address for creating accounts in other websites.
Fail safe ways to protect Username & Passwords
Many websites are replacing username & password combination these days. Say it for health applications; they?re using facial recognitions with integrated voice authentication. Moreover fingerprint readers, facial & voice authentication is already getting integrated in certain industry sectors & particularly for smart phones, according to Alan Goode, managing director of London-based research firm Goode Intelligence.
Goode Intelligence forecasts that mobile phone biometric security products and services will generate just over $30 million in 2011 and that the market will grow to over $ 161 million in revenue by 2015; an increase of over $130 million.
Well for some people, the subject of password may sound as a joke but for most of us, it will still remain an imminent chapter in our lives for the foreseeable future. It is quite obvious that we?ll need password management software (majority of them are free, and even the commercial products are cheap). Fingerprint scanners are the latest additions & very soon the banking sector may introduce voice modularity authentication to recognize our identities.
Siddhartha Dutta, Founder & Director at Fox Web Wizardz Pvt. Ltd, an ISO certified company (www.web-wizardz.com). This article was published in ‘Sharada (page no. 66 & 67), Puja Special Magazine of “The Echo of India“.
