A team of Vice editors quizzed attendees at the latest DEF CON, one of the biggest cybersecurity conferences in the world, why so many people were still subject to robberies and crimes on the web, with the most common answer because they don’t take even the most obvious and simple precautions.
A recent study by Google concluded that hundreds of thousands of people use not only the same password for websites and services, but even continue to use passwords that have been published and associated with their username on the internet, as a result of security leaks from services they used at some time. The equivalent in the physical world would be to lose a key that opened your front door, your car, your office and gym locker, and that, in addition, you had left where anybody could find it. The question, obviously, would not be if you were to be robbed, but when.
That’s right: hundreds of thousands of people use not only stupidly simple passwords, but also use them for multiple sites; what’s more, these passwords together with your username, are already out there, easily available to anybody who wants to use them for credential stuffing: simply take those user and password pairs and randomly test them automatically to see if that user has also used them for other services.
How to know if we are one of that sorry group? We repeat: the problem is no longer simply…
