As technology becomes more and more advanced, we’re seeing an amazing progress in the security field. Companies spend millions to keep the bad guys out. We have IPS/IDS, NACs, AVs, FWs, AAA, TACACS, ADS, IAM, SIEM and more acronyms than a typical teenager’s vocabulary.  Security budgets consistently spans 10 – 15% of organisation budgets, and according to the greatest oracle of all, Gartner:

“While the global economic slowdown has been putting pressure on IT budgets, security is expected to remain a priority through 2016, according to Gartner, Inc. Worldwide spending on security is expected to rise to $60 billion in 2012, up 8.4 percent from $55 billion in 2011. Gartner expects this trajectory to continue, reaching $86 billion in 2016.”

So this year, we’re seeing an IT security spending of the GDP of Cuba. Yup, Cuba. Where Havana cigars come from and Che Guevara became famous. It sounds like a lot of money. And it will get higher. As long as more automation is done. As long as more technology is needed. As long as more day-to-day banking is needed. As long as human beings are lazier and want more things faster. Information Technology will continue to grow, and along with it, all the wonderfully, naughty activities that invariably accompany such growth.

While millions are spent on equipments, many of us neglect one of the most basic problem of all.

Passwords don’t work.

That’s because humans are invariably lazy. Or we would rather remember the phone number of that girl we met at the bar, or the pizza take out than to bother remembering our 12 letter, alpha numeric, lower case, upper case, special character password that must not resemble an english word or name, and must not be the same as the last 12 passwords you have, and recycled every month. And yeah, also can’t be your name, your family name, your dog’s name or the nickname you named your car. Or your bike. Or your computer, for us geeks.

It’s a broken feature. This article is both hilarious and scary. Like a korean horror movie.

Since biometric tech like fingerprint and face scanning is too expensive at the moment, passwords are still the defacto security problem many of us face. You can’t impose too complicated passwords on your users or your IT service desk will be flooded with “I forgot my password” tickets. Or you will have to constantly implement a “Reset you password” feature every day. But having no password policies is also asking for it. Users will tend to use password as password, which if you think about it, is absolutely genius if no one knows about it. It’s like doing the most stupidly obvious thing that your enemy would not believe that you’d be stupid enough to do it. Except now, it’s a known and acceptable stupidity, like lemmings falling off a cliff.

Password123, p@ssw0rd (or any other variants of that), password1, password2012 etc have all the same funky, useless theme: we are lazy creatures. The list has some interesting ones, like abc123 (who has never used that before?) and interestingly, Jesus, which is new. I mean, is that due to lots of IT users are christians, or that would be the first word that comes out of people’s lips when they think “Now what on earth is my password already???!”

Since passwords will never leave us for the near future, the best way to use a password is  simple, specific, and only you know about it. For instance, if you met your wife in Cicero’s on June 1986, your password could be c1cer0s1986_J. Or something. Craft out something that when you see that word, you can immediately associate it with a memory you have. Or if you paraglided down Mount Mutombo in Venuzuela with a guy called Hokey who then proceeded to almost kill you because you are a secret agent: Mut0mb0V3n_Hok3y_Di3! I don’t know. You get the idea.

So put away the normal passwords, and more importantly don’t ever, ever use yellow stick it notes on your cubicle, monitor, desk, pedestal, under your keyboard or under your chair. Please.