In 2015, it won’t matter if hackers steal your password

[steve2470]

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/in-2015-it-wont-matter-if-hackers-steal-your-password-2014-08-08

The password could be dead by 2015.

That’s the prediction (and hope) among security experts who are racing to replace the is-it-really-you test, which dates to the early 1960s. Since then, passwords have become an omnipresent nuisance for both users and security officers—perpetually forgotten and inevitably stolen, as evidenced this week by the news that a Russian gang has amassed a trove of more than one billion login credentials. (Read: More than a billion online accounts breached by Russian gang.)

Two out of every three data breaches involve the exploitation of weak or stolen passwords, according to Verizon’s 2014 Data Breach Investigations Report. And making them stronger isn’t much help.

The more requirements websites add for passwords—to reach a minimum number of characters using uppercases, lowercases, and special characters, to avoid strings similar to previous passwords, to do a handstand while typing it in—the more likely people are to reuse passwords across accounts or create weak ones, researchers say. A 2012 study found that almost one-third of people have more than 10 unique passwords, and 38% of people would rather scrub toilets than try to come up with new ones.

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