Beware, simple passwords are a big risk

Is your password your spouse’s , child’s or pet’s name? Or a combination of these? Do you use the same password for multiple websites—your emails, social networking sites, online banking transactions, workplace login?

If you do, you are not very different from many others. Despite websites telling us to choose passwords that have a combination of letters and numbers, and are difficult to figure out, most of us still choose a password that easily fits our memory. And given the proliferating number of websites requiring passwords, it would look near impossible to remember multiple, complex passwords. But the flip side of what you do is that, you could be asking for big trouble. 

According to information provided by security solutions provider Trend Micro, about 37% of those who fall victim to hackers are non-tech savvy net users who use simple passwords . Such passwords make the job of cyber crackers easier and faster.

Pavan Duggal, a cyber law expert, says a weak password could result in your losing critical personal or professional data, or your money reaching someone else’s account without your knowledge. More dangerously , your hijacked computer can become a platform for cyber criminals or terrorists to meet and interact. 

You may find it difficult to prove that you were hacked and therefore innocent. Such a criminal exposure can attract three years of life imprisonment under the IT Act 2008. “Once you are at the receiving end, your road to justice will be long winding and you may invariably never get the desired result,’’ says Dugal.

Even the ‘secret’ answers that websites ask for at the time of password registration are often dead giveaways. Based on a study on a group of 130 people, researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that 28% of those who “knew and were trusted’ ’ by co participants managed to guess their ‘secret’ answers, while those who were “not trusted’ ’ by the participants still guessed right a good 17% of the time.

For example, take the standard “What’s the name of your pet?’’ question; it was guessed right 40% of the time by people that the participants “would not trust with their password’’ , a figure that rises to 45% for that old favourite, “Where were you born?’’

A Gartner study conducted among 4,000 adults who browse online says consumers prefer convenience over security . Most aren’t interested in password management as they want easy way out and in.

Many net users won’t even know that their systems are under attack, until their systems stop responding or data/money is lost. Amit Nath, the India head for Trend Micro, says passwords could be compromised when buying movie, train, bus or air tickets online.

What’s a good password?

Most websites will advise you to use a combination of letters, figures, currency signs, etc to make passwords stronger. But these would still be difficult to remember and you are likely to note it down somewhere, which could be risky. One suggestion experts have is to create a phrase that’s easy to remember and then key in the entire phrase, or use the initials of each word in the phrase. 

Thus, you could have IgfSJCi1995 for ‘I graduated from St Joseph’s College in 1995’ or Mwlf15yiND’ for ‘My wife lived for 15 years in New Mumbai’ . Generally, the longer the password, the better it is. And never choose a word from the dictionary for your password. It’s easy for hackers to run programs that repeatedly try to log in to your account using words from the dictionary. At some point, they will crack it.