Password Security

With the development in technologies and social networking, our personal information that we post online are all protected by passwords. From online banking, to Facebook, email accounts eBay, we all have multiple passwords protecting our personal information. But how secure is our information online? As technology continues to advance, hackers find new ways around security password systems to breach in to personal information on individuals. One of the major issues of password protection is the lack of complexity in the choice of personal passwords. There are several online programs which exist that can try to use every combination of words and number patterns to attempt to hack into peoples personal accounts. In 2009 an anonymous user posted the usernames and passwords of over 10, 000 Windows Hotmail users on a website called PasteBin, and approximately 95% of them were valid passwords (Bogdan Calin, 2009). Password security is a major concern with online websites, especially social networking pages such as Facebook and Myspace, as hackers attempt to use spam mail and spyware to post malicious content to infiltrate passwords and information to the millions of social networking users across the world. In 2009, over “70% of the top 100 most popular web pages either hosted malicious spyware content or masked redirect links to lure victims from legitimate websites to malicious ones” (Websense, 2009). This form of cyber criminal activity which attempts to lure individuals to give out sensitive information such as credit card numbers and passwords online is coined with the term “phishing.” In 2005, the United States alone suffered a loss of approximately $929 million due to phishing (Alan Davidon, 2009). Hackers are constantly trying to lure individuals into websites with malicious content especially on social networking web pages, such as Facebook and Myspace, often using spam mail and advertisements to lure individuals into entering websites containing spyware, which can access personal information from the user.