Secure Today

PASSWORD MANAGEMENT

One of the overlooked area many of us struggle with is password management. In our day to day computing activities, many of us would simply just use or chose to protect our assets with a simple password. These assets could be critical such as bank accounts, confidential data, or even health information. We are lacking the real work on password management.

Now, just what is password management really is? Well, in its very simplest form, managing passwords!

In corporate world, there are various technologies that does password management. In fact, password management is covered in a good scope on many of books for the CISSP exam.

Now, before going deeper to it, let’s magnify our glass to the word password itself. Many, if not all of us know what password is. That’s the word you write on your sticky note and hide it underneath your keyboard. Kidding aside.

Password is the most widely and commonly used authentication mechanism. They are also considered the weakest security mechanism. Users would simply choose very easy passwords such as their date of birth, favorite color, their nickname, etc., that are easy enough to guess. Sometimes too, they give it away to their buddies or best friends.

It is funny yet interesting to see how users typically thinks security is not one of the most important part of their computer. Not until someone hacks into their computer or account, then that’s when security is all the frustrations.

So here comes password management to the rescue. Although the scope of this article will dive only deeper to day-to-day users of computers, emails and services; it will touch a bit on the corporate world where I will cover some of the best ways in managing password. Bear in mind, this article does not go deeper in how to implement SSO technologies or token devices and such.

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PHISHING is a social engineering technique, which means to trick someone into believing something but different to what it really means, with a full purpose of obtaining personal information, credit card information and credentials.

The word phishing has been around since 1996. It was originally coined by hackers who started stealing AOL passwords by posing as a staff member and sending email messages to victims asking them their account information to verify their billing information and other information about their AOL accounts. The attacker lure, or fish the victims. This is when the word phishing began.

Although this social engineering technique had been around since the ’90’s it did not hit its popularity until the mid-2003. Phishing attackers, also called phishers creates very convincing emails requesting victims to click on links to update their account information. These emails and the redirecting website looks very closely similar to the actual website. Too convincing enough, a typical user would not spot the differences.

Some of the few tricks that these phishers would manipulate is to ask you to click on the link inside the email with a link almost the same as the actual website. For example, if you have an account with Bank of Alaska and their website is bankofalaska.com, they would create a site something like backofalaska.com. Or they would place @ symbol like bankofalaska.com@oursite.com. Before the @ sign would be the username following the http protocol. The actual website is oursite.com, which is a bad site. Depending on the way the site is written, the username can be ignored if it is not required.

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