Weak password? Everyone wants to fix that
HEADLINES about mass data breaches have become ominously routine, and yet password convenience still trumps security for most people.
That’s why, year after year, the world’s most popular log-on remains “123456,” a password so obvious it accounted for 17 per cent of the 10 million compromised passwords analysed by Keeper Security, which sells a log-in management service.
The answer, of course, is to get rid of passwords altogether. Biometric technology-especially fingerprint scanners- has been steadily replacing the need to type in a password, which can easily be guessed by hackers wielding smart algorithms.
Now, with the world increasingly embracing voiceactivated devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, companies are starting to create technology that recognises a person’s speech patterns. Facial recognition is starting to catch on as well.
“Our vision is to kill passwords completely,” says Dylan Casey, vice president of product management at Yahoo Inc., which has suffered major security breaches. “In the future, we’ll look back on this time and laugh that we were required to create a 10-character code with upperand lower-case letters, a number, and special character to sign in, much in the same way that today’s teenagers must laugh at the concept of buying an album on a compact disc.”
The question is whether companies will be able to persuade people to switch to biometric log-ins and whether the new technology will prove any more resistant to hackers than the oldfashioned password.
Apple popularised the fingerprint scanner by embedding it in the iPhone four years ago, subsequently baking the technology into the MacBook lineup. Now Microsoft is getting into the act. Last month, the company started to let the estimated 800 million people who use its Outlook.com, Xbox.com, Skype.com and other cloud-based features log on with a fingerprint scan on their smartphone if they so choose.
By October or November this year “you’ll be able to take your phone, walk up to your Windows 10 PC and just use your thumb print to log into your PC,” says Alex Simons, who’s in charge of products within Microsoft’s
Our vision is to kill passwords completely., which has suffered major security breaches. In the future, we’ll look back on this time and laugh that we were required to create a 10-character code with upper- and lower-case letters, a number, and special character to sign in, much in the same way that today’s teenagers must laugh at the concept of buying an album on a compact disc. — Dylan Casey, vice president of product management at Yahoo Inc
identity division.
The banking industry, long mindful of security, has adopted some of the most cutting-edge technology. The UK bank Barclays started letting wealthy customers verify their identity during telephone banking with their voices back in 2014, and rolled out an opt-in version to retail clients last year.
“Our voice security works by taking a recording and analysing the different voice patterns, the vocal tones, the pitch and the pace,” says Simon Separghan, who’s in charge of Barclays’ contact centres across the UK, India and the Philippines. He said the bank is currently working to implement the technology into its mobile banking app. HSBC, Citi, Santander are also all starting to let customers use their voices to log into their telephone banking accounts.
Face recognition is becoming more common as well. Lloyds Banking Group announced in April that it would trial Microsoft’s Windows Hello technology, which lets online users log into their web-based accounts by pointing their face at a computer’s webcam. United Services Automobile Association has enabled the same within its mobile app for smartphones, as has UK challenger bank Atom.
Is the new technology hackerproof? Barclays’ Separghan is sanguine about the bank’s voiceactivated log-in system and says there have been no breaches so far. “We’re very confident that the system is as unique as your fingerprint,” he says. “So whether or not people are doing impressions or tape recordings and playing them back, the system has the ability to detect that.”
But Michela Menting, digital security research director at ABI Research, isn’t so sure. “With artificial intelligence you’ll have machines that’ll be able to clone human voices and maybe be able to pretend to be somebody else,” she says. — Bloomberg