¨dadada¨ Is NOT a Good Password

Posted by JD 06/07/2016 at 00:00

It has been reported that Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts used the trivial password, dadada .

  • Using the same password on two online accounts is poor security practice. Mr. Zuckerberg should know better.
  • Using only 2 characters, no mixed case, no numbers and no special characters is poor security practice. Mr. Zuckerberg should know better.
  • Using only 6 characters total is just stupid these days. Anything less than 12 characters takes under 24 hrs to break with home computing power from 5 yrs ago. Mr. Zuckerberg should know better.

Security practices start at the top. I suppose if your company is primarily about hookups and cat photos, then security might not be on the forefront of your mind.

Links

What Hope Do We Have?

People are saying if Mr. Zuckerberg fails at this, what hope do they have? CEOs tend to ignore security, IME. I was told by a CEO that if I made the minimum password 15 characters (plus a sufficient complexity), he would switch to using his hotmail account. Reminds me of Ms. Clinton.

At my job, In the 1990s, a group of co-developers stole my work password because they were too lazy to setup their own Windows account to perform InstallShield packaging. I reported the infraction to my boss, the VP of Development and a founder of the company. When he refused to do anything about it, I started looking for another job. 2 months later I was gone.
The next company wasn´t much better about security, but the following one was excellent and I worked there for about 8 yrs. I left over contractual differences, not the people nor the work.

A Fine Line

I suppose for some people, having all the security enforced that I believe is require could also be a reason for many more workers to leave, so management needs to walk a careful line if the work is not interesting enough for people to stay even with good network and computer security.