The Most Popular Passwords of Ashley Madison Users – Overused, Predictable and Unreliable
Ashley Madison is a popular Canadian resource for users who do not mind to leave the line of a faithful husband and have some fun on the side. The basis for the creation of Ashley Madison was the idea of a dating site for the purpose of adultery, which is evident from the motto on its main page «Life is short. Have an affair ». August 19, 2015 was a “fateful day” for many users of the site, as well as for their spouses, as a group of...
The Theft of The Century, or Why Do News Websites Need Two-Factor Authentication?
Why Is Two-Factor Authentication Necessary? Increasingly more companies are using two-factor authentication in their online operations. Sometimes, it surprises or even annoys their users. They may think: why waste my precious time on entering additional characters? Isn’t a password sufficient? With the widely spread advanced computer technologies, we have possibilities that our parents could only read about in science fiction novels....
Selfie Based Authentication in Banking System: “Latest Fad” or Increased Protection Reliability?
It is no secret that for a long time now MasterCard has been working on solving the problem of authentication in the banking system and testing an application that would use traditional two-factor authentication to authenticate customers and authorize online purchases based on the face recognition technology and not numerical codes. In other words, to be able to pay with a credit card online, the card holder would have to take a...
What Hides Beneath SMS Authentication?
We have to pay for everything in life. Whatever you may call it — the law of conservation of energy, karma, or Divine Providence — that is how it is and how it will always be. In the 19th century, a postal courier loyal to his sovereign would risk his life delivering a letter to the addressee, which took up to a month, protecting it from any possible foes. In the 21st century, data exchange is carried out instantly, but it is a lot...
Ideal Authentication
Creativity is the art of compromise. One gifted artist may never receive recognition during his lifetime and die penniless (Vincent Van Gogh). Another one may mass-produce a painting a day to order and bask in his glory (Boris Kustodiev). Time was the final judge as to the talent and merit of these two artists and their works, but it happened only after they died. The procedure of authenticity verification is a kind of art, too. For a...
How to Make Authentication Simple and Secure
The Rothschild brothers, who grew rich making profits on the results of the Battle of Waterloo, used to say: “He who owns information owns the world”. The only thing to specify here is who the information belongs to: yourself or somebody else. All throughout its history, mankind has been involved in authentication technique development, from making call signals imitating birds’ sounds and manual ciphering to logging into a system via...