Addictions can be attached to pretty much anything and everything. From alcohol and drugs to food and porn. South Korean even had to create a law that treats game addiction like drugs and alcohol. But there is addiction that affects billions of people daily and it doesn’t seem to be acknowledged; that is the addiction to passwords. Dependencies usually start out as something necessary, but they grow into monsters over time. Sometimes they are even celebrated annually.
Annual Password Reset Day
It seems there is now a holiday for everything. Days have been identified for religious reasons and commemorative reasons, for president’s birthdays, for mothers, fathers and even mother-in-laws as well as for reasons that date back to pagan times. So, it is no surprise that a new day needs to be set aside to accommodate the technology age. Thanks to Matt Buchanan at Gizmodo we now have that day. Mr. Buchanan has dubbed “February 1 Is Change Your Password Day” and wrote:
“Anyways, I thought it would be a good idea if we all changed our passwords together. Like positive peer pressure, ’cause it’s pretty goddamn annoying. Sooner is better than later, so I was thinking maybe we should all change our passwords on February 1. I’m not very creative, so I’ve decided to just call it ‘Change Your Password Day.’”
Do We Really Need Passwords Still?
A Wired article from back in 2012 titled “Do You Really Need a Password You Can Barely Remember?” and reported:
“Eight years ago, Bill Gates predicted that computer passwords were not long for this world. They were the weak link in computer security he said, adding: ‘There’s no doubt that over time people are going to rely less and less on passwords.’”
The article goes on to also report:
“In the trade press, Gates’s prediction was reported as the death knell for passwords. And then eight years went by. During that time, Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia added hundreds of millions of users — all of them logging in with plain old passwords — without a single smart card or RSA token. Even Microsoft’s heavily promoted Cardspace easy authentication software was a flop.”
So, it’s now been 14 years since Mr. Gates prediction, and we still seem to maintain our password addiction. Just like any addiction, it seems that time just keeps flying by and every excuse we can come up with stops us from breaking the cycle. It is always easier to keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Our dependency on passwords is no different.
It’s time to take the first steps to break our password addiction. In 12-step programs the first step is to acknowledge the problem, then you are ready to work on the solution. Acknowledging that passwords truly have outlived their effectiveness gives you the freedom to evaluate new AIML-based technologies.
We have also written about “Beyond the Password: What Other Identity Authentication Technologies Are There?” so check out that blog and then begin your life without passwords.
Life Without Passwords
Acceptto’s eGuardian engine continuously creates, and monitors user behavior profiles based on the user interaction with the It’sMe authenticator. Every time an activity occurs, actionable intelligence is gathered and used to optimize the user profile. eGuardian is capable of autonomously and continually learning new policies and adapting existing ones. While policies can still be manually defined and contribute to the computation, our Biobehavioral AIML approach automatically finds the optimal policy for each transaction. eGuardian leverages a mixture of AI & ML, expert systems and SMEs to classify, detect, and model behavior, and assign real-time risk scores to continuously validate your identity prior to, during and post-authentication.
Check out what Acceptto can do to ensure your employees, partners and customers can authenticate without passwords and still ensure security and privacy registering for a free demo today.
