What's your Password?

http://www.tapscape.com/password-security-apple-protects-users/

The TedTalk presentation that I chose was called "What's Wrong with Your Pa$$word?" by Lorrie Faith Carnor a Security Researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. Lorrie explains how many people only select passwords that are easy to remember or have a common rhythm, such as: password or 123123. She and her colleagues did a few surveys/ data collecting. The first survey they did was collecting data about people's password; the length, digits or symbols used, etc. Then they did an online data collecting on Amazon Mechanical Turk, where a random group of people have to create a password that is at least eight characters, another group’s passwords should be comprehensive eight, and another for the basic sixteen characters. They realized that the long and complex passwords are both very strong but the complex ones are harder to remember. Password meters are found to be very useful in making sure people's password is good enough, because when the meter says it’s an “okay” password it doesn’t make you feel satisfied to you retry until it says “strong.” Lorrie did testing with Pass Phrase passwords and it seems that people made more error when typing in their password and random password were too difficult to remember although harder to guess. At one point during the presentation Lorrie said that the people in the associated with the computer science department had better passwords then those in the business department. Which I thought was obvious because they are more knowledgeable about computer hacking and how easy it is to do something like that. Hackers may break into your private accounts if you are not careful. These passwords may then be sold and posted onto a website where everyone may access your personal data. As Lorrie said at the end of her presentation "when you're creating your password, try to think about something else."