Today, May 3, 2018, is World Password Day. It also means that today is the best day for upgrading your online security by creating a stronger, secure password. On this World Password Day, let’s make a pact – let’s promise ourselves to ‘Layer Up’. Also, let’s forget the cardinal rule of password creation: choosing something far easy to remember!
There’s another rule which is never spoken of. Aside from the usual requirements, here’s what your password should contain: three distinctively different recipes for Thanksgiving chicken, that dark joke no one laughs at, one of your kidneys and your perfect Sunday!
You could say that every year, the World Password Day becomes more than a creative imagination exercise. You’ll have plenty of time to rack your brains out to reset your password. In the meanwhile, here’s something you might want to read and share with your friends!
A Day’s Worth of Password Facts to Get You Through
- At one time, Facebook had a master password that would work for any account. The password spelled out ‘Chuck Norris,’ more or less, but with upper and lower case, symbols and numbers.
- Speaking of Facebook, did you know that Mark Zuckerberg was once sued by 3 reporters from Crimson after he hacked into their email accounts to monitor an investigation against him? To hack into the email accounts, Zuckerberg used invalid logins on facebook.com, to zero in on their email passwords.
Image: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with Chinese actor Jet Li.
- For 20 years, the passwords for US nuclear missiles was 00000000.
- In 1999, hackers revealed a security flaw in Hotmail which permitted anybody to log into a Hotmail account using the password ‘eh’. At the time, it was called “the most widespread security incident in the history of the Internet.”
- American soldiers in the Pacific theatre used the word lollapalooza as a shibboleth to challenge unidentified persons, on the premise that Japanese people often pronounce the letter L as R or confuse Rs with Ls. Upon hearing the first two syllables as “rorra” they would immediately open fire without waiting for the rest.
- Jeremy Hammond, one of the most wanted cybercriminals in America was arrested after he was hacked by the FBI. His password was the name of his cat plus ‘123’.
- Motorola has developed an edible password pill, which one ingested is activated by the acid in your stomach emitting an 18-bit signal which is strong enough to communicate and unlock all your devices. Here’s the crazy part: the edible password pill is FDA approved.
- In 2012, security experts developed a five-server clustered computing environment powered by 25 graphics cards that could create 350 billion password guesses per second.
Aren’t these password facts gasp-worthy? We stayed true to our promise. Now it’s your turn to keep your side of the bargain. So, don’t forget to leave your iCloud, Twitter, Facebook and Outlook password in the comments section below.
