Too many passwords for comfort

PASSWORD is no longer the most-used password on the internet, according to research by software firm, SplashData.

The security experts have worried us into action. But ‘password’ has slipped only as far as second place. and it has been replaced by that cryptic barrier, ‘123456’.

So we are not security sophisticates yet. But nonetheless it feels like a changing of the guard.

This is global data, mind you, so we don’t know if the findings apply here in Ireland.

It would be a finer achievement, on the experts’ part, to convince an financially indebted people that the theft of their identities would be anything other than a blessed miracle.

It is security measures, of course, rather than security threats, that have ruined computers.

It started with the virus software. And the firewalls. And the updates. And the reboots. And the scans. And the firewalls turning themselves off.

And the ‘your software is out of date’ messages. And the availability of newer updates.

Probably all clever strands of the worry initiative. If this is the cure, how bad must the sickness be?

When we consider the rise of the tablet, we know that it is not entirely driven by a sudden desire to jab out one-fingered emails.

In most cases, people just want a machine that does the worrying for them.

They don’t exactly know how this machine is coping with all the worries heaped on its shoulders. And they certainly don’t want to know.

But even tablets won’t spare us from passwords. In fact, they tend to demand another password, to go with the other logins and pin codes and access keys.

And the experts, refusing to rest on their laurels with the big switch to ‘123456’, tell us we need to come up with a different one every time.

They can smell blood now, the experts.

They have sucked me in. I was never man enough to run with the ‘password’ crowd. Or even the ‘123456’ crowd. I admired them, sure, regarded them as inspirational, zen characters, daring the unseen enemy to do its worst.

They might be regarded as eejits now, by the likes of SplashData, but I wonder how many of them got caught by the unseen enemy? They don’t give us that important data.

No, I had a trusty password and I wasn’t afraid to use it. And reuse it.

Likewise, the same pin was good for the Laser and the Visa and the phone, and for anything else that looked for a number.

But, one day, they broke me. It was probably Watchdog, on the BBC, that did it. It’s usually Watchdog.

I joined the ranks of the security responsible — a dark day.

It may be 10 years since I successfully committed anything new to memory, never mind a sequence of alphanumeric and special characters that must contain at least one numeral and an uppercase letter, so this tended to add some additional steps to the operation of many online services.

The more regular route encompassed the ‘Forgot Password’ link, then onto checking the email, refreshing the email, checking the trash, finding something gas in the trash and forgetting what it was you were trying to log into.

There was also the danger of coming unstuck on the autobiographical test. Place of birth? Did you really admit, as a prisoner of the health system, to Limerick?

First Pet? The name comes easy, but so, too, does the image of the man who came to the door and took him away “to make things better for him.” Or shoot him, as the racket from the back of the house indicated.

And you forget what you were trying to log into.

There are solutions out there, of course.

The experts are good at creating solutions, once they have created problems. There are places that hold all your passwords, for use when the time is right.

But you need to log in, presumably via a password. And that seems like a lot of pressure to be putting on one password.

So, inevitably, you arrive at the solution the ‘password’ crowd and the ‘123456’ crowd have managed to avoid so far.

You write them all down somewhere handy.

Who is the bigger eejit?