False Sense of Security
In Mat Honan’s article “How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws led to my Epic Hacking”, I found the ease in which the hackers were able to break into all of Honan’s accounts and devices especially disturbing. Because Honan had all his accounts linked together and his devices hooked up to iCloud once the hackers got into one account they had access to his entire digital life. This goes to show that new technologies made by Apple and other companies to make things easier for their users can actually end up harming them. As consumers of digital material, we want easy access to all our digital information all the time but what we don’t realize is that this allows other, unwanted people to have access to this same information. Are we really ready to give up security for convenience? I mean think about it, how many of us have our passwords saved on our computers so we don’t have to go through the hassle of signing into our accounts every time we want to use them? And how many of us have our credit numbers stored in our accounts such as Amazon, so we don’t have to put the in effort of typing in the numbers every time we want to purchase something? Sure it makes it so much easier and faster to purchase something when all you have to do is click a button but then again that means someone else can just as easily purchase something from your account.
I think that our demand for convenience and our laziness (think about “Passwords Under Assault” where for 25 accounts people only have 6.5 passwords) combined with our disregard or ignorance of how dangerous hackers can be, has led us to believe that by assigning a password to an account (even one like Password1) makes it secure. In reality though, passwords can be easily changed or in the case of Honan, are not even needed at all to access an account.
Another thing Honan pointed out that I found interesting, was that even using the same username for several accounts can be dangerous. I never really thought about protecting my username because I guess I figured without a password it won’t get anywhere. Usernames can be seen by anybody and when they are typed into the login text box they are not hidden like passwords are. I think this leads us to believe that they are not that important and do not need to be protected. As it turns out, usernames, especially ones that are e-mail addresses, can be of value to hackers and can help link them to all of your other accounts. With all this information in mind, I now have a different attitude towards the security of my online accounts and now realize the devastating effects that can result from a lack of precaution employed when using the Internet.