Hacking and password security

My recent article on why password security matters to all of us, and especially those of us who run accounts for organizations and businesses, originally posted on the Resource Media Blog.   Another day, another data breach. We have been inured to the news of corporations being hacked and our data being spilled out into the black market: Target, Home Depot, Anthem, Primera, American Express, Chase, Twitter… These represent large scale, sophisticated hacks, in most cases, targeting personal and financial information. But they are by no means the only security breaches that take place and affect millions of people. Individually we may be concerned about our bank account our email account being hacked. But as is often pointed out, we humans tend to worry about the wrong risks (stranger abduction rather than accidents as a threat to child safety, for example).  But every day many of us do something that puts us and our organizations in jeopardy. We use weak passwords and we share them in plain text over email. For the average individual, the chances of this vulnerability being exploited may be rather low and the impact can range from a relatively minor inconvenience to a major headache. But for individuals that manage organizational media, the damage can be major. Take, for example, the recent hacking of Big Think’s Facebook page. While the details are not yet clear, it is very likely, from what I understand, that a hacker gained access to one of the page admin’s accounts. The hacker then made his or herself an admin and deleted the legitimate admins. Though Big Think was able to...