Security Breaches and My Password Thoughts

Facebook security breaches have been in the news every day lately.  Are you concerned?  No, because you think you're a smarty pants and have changed your Facebook password, so there!  Well, that might not be enough.  Have you ever went to a new website and they asked you to sign up and offered you the convenience of using your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Google account?  If you elected for convenience then you opened yourself up to the Facebook breach.  Never choose Facebook or Google as a login for accounts, always use your email address.  There is always another choice although often it is a little harder to find.  

What is the Facebook or Google or LinkedIn convenience login called?  In the tech industry we call this the "you as" login or officially OpenID.  We'll log you in as.....your xxxxx account.  

How does it work?  How do it know?  When you click the button for the app to log in as, that website goes out and queries the app (Facebook, Linkedin, Google, whoever) and asks for a token.  The website then stores that token forever for when you come back and login.  That token contains your password from the app.  

What does the Facebook security breach have to do with that token?  If your account info and/or password was stolen from Facebook then the bad guys have access to any site you used the "You as" login on.  That means you've spread your vulnerability across multiple entities.  

Do you believe that the Facebook breach only affected 50,000,000 users?  Of course not silly! Facebook has 2.23 billion user accounts.  

What are the best practices i should follow?

Never use the "You as" feature for new sign ups to 3rd party apps
• If you’re using an easy to see pattern for customizing your passwords for each site or service, then change that pattern (and all of those passwords) 
• always a good idea to have different passwords for accounts involving money, those passwords should be complex.  Pet + a number is NOT complex.  A password CAN be complex but easy to remember.  Here's an example --  a sentence -- Dawn is the best person I know and funny too.   Take that sentence and convert it ---  DitbpIk&f2      That's a complex password but easy to remember for you.  It's the first letter of each word and convert things like and to a symbol and the too to a 2.  Complex passwords should have lower case, upper case, special symbols/characters, and number(s)
• Implement 2 factor authentication on your important accounts, like brokerage, banks, credit cards, etc.  Also called MFA or 2FA (Multi Factor authentication) - basically, it texts you a code that you put in after your password.  Here is an excellent short video explaining 2FA
• Change your birth year on Facebook.  If you put all your personal information on Facebook and someone hacks your Facebook could they use that to get in to other accounts?  Your pet is Fido.  You were born in 1980, your dog was born in 2016, the hacker knows that because you put his birthday party on Facebook.  So chances are really good that some of your passwords are Fido1980 or Fido2016.  Change them!
• Personally, I go as far as putting an incorrect day, month and year as my birthday on Facebook.  My friends know it's my birthday when it's my real  birthday.  I don't care about anyone else....

Trouble remembering all your passwords?  There are many alternatives.  One is the free version of lastpass.com which I use, to store and populate passwords online.  It's free for personal version, costs $$ for companies.  There are other password 

Low tech?  This works great!   https://www.amazon.com/ Password-Keeper-Galison/dp/ 0735344620/ref=sr_1_13?ie= UTF8&qid=1514996876&sr=8-13& keywords=password+book

That book is small enough to hide.  Has tabs with alphabet to quickly find things.  oh and let me state the obvious, if you write them down, don't take the book with you, ANYWHERE

Want more information? Here are some links

Facebook breach and 3rd party apps using Facebook Connect 

What is this "You as" feature?  here

These opinions are my own.  You are responsible for your own account security.  

Social Media Revolution - Facts

Social Media isn't a fad, it's a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

• 96% of all Gen Y have a social networking page.
• social media has overtaken porn as the number one Internet activity.
• one out of 8 recently married couples met on social networking sites.
• It took 13 years for TV to hit 50 million households, 4 years for the Internet and only 9 months for Facebook to hit 100 million users and 12 months for 200 million users.
• If Facebook were a country it would be the 3rd largest in the world.
• 80% of companies are using LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees.
• The fastest growing segment on facebook is the 55-65 year old female
• 80% of twitter usage is on mobile devices, people update anytime, anywhere, imagine what that means for bad customer experiences
• in 2009 Boston College stopped issues email addresses to new students, Gen Y feels email is passe
• YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world.
• Studies show that wikipedia is more accurate than the encyclopedia Britannica.
• 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations.
• Only 33% of 18 - 34 year olds have ever viewed a show on a DVR - they hulu it

Thanks to the youtube video on social revolution for reminding me of the fundamental shift in communication that we are currently living in. If you're looking for a job and you're not on LinkedIn then shame on you. Do you know what wikipedia is? Do you Yelp? Even my hairdresser asked me to review him on Yelp the other day. Where are you in the social revolution? Have you been trying to play catch up, are you right in the thick of it all or have you been left in the dust?

Facebook Tagging & Other Features

Wanted to key you in to a feature that has been out for awhile but some of you may not be aware of on Facebook. We're all familiar with tagging people in our pictures but you have been able to tag people on your status posts for about a year now. The way you do this is to type your status - "out scrapbooking with @ir ....." after typing the @ symbol and a couple letter a drop down box appears with matching names. You choose the person you are tagging in your status and it's done. Why is this important? Well, frankly it's not important at all but it does alert your friend that you've posted something with/about them. This also works for any entity on facebook, like starbucks or minabea. Here is a detailed description of the feature with screen shots.

Today Facebook launched a revamped old feature that I'm really digging which is groups. I've always felt that Groups in Facebook was useless essentially but now they have made it easy for you to build a space for important groups of people in your life—your family, your soccer team, your book club. All you have to do to get started is to create a group, add friends and start sharing.

When a group member posts to the group, everyone in the group will receive a notification about that post. Now I won't have to guess anymore about whether my parents saw the pictures I posted of their grandkids; when I post in my family group, I'll know that they've been notified about it and that only they will see it. Since information posted in my new groups is only visible to group members by default, I can feel confident about who sees what I post. Other features in the new revamped groups is group chat and group email.

The last item that I wanted to talk about was another revamped feature released on September 30th, 2010 in Photos. Facebook is now allowing higher resolution (photo quality) pictures, easier picture viewing (it was quite a pain before), easier tagging (multiple photos if you're uploading like a wedding or something with all the same people) and a simpler uploading plug in.

Facebook

After pressure from relatives, I took the plunge. I joined facebook. Facebook is a social networking website started by some young, pimply faced Harvard school dropout who is filthy rich now. It originally started as a university/college site but has evolved in it's short 4 year existence to 60 million users worldwide. It was started Feb. 4, 2004. It's even reached such notoriety that Iran and Syria block it. Of course, they probably block everything......

The information users provide on Facebook has been used in investigations by colleges, universities, and local police. Facebook's Terms of Use specify that "the website is available for your personal, noncommercial use only", misleading some to believe that college administrators and police may not use the site for conducting investigations. Furthermore, some employers look at Facebook profiles of prospective employees or interns. Information posted on Facebook is potentially accessible to employers with faculty or alumni accounts.[66] Myspace has also been used for checking out future and current employees, etc. So be very careful what you post on the big world wide web.

I've been on it now for a couple weeks and while I found many of my cousins on there I was surprise to find an entire Mitel network of ~ 200 Mitel employees including the COO and several VPs. This just proves the paragraph above. I've found many of the add on applications buggy and some have said many of them are spam generators, keystroke loggers, etc. Any applications I add I'm very careful to ensure they are used by many, many people. I suppose if I load an application that is used by many I'm under the false belief that so many people couldn't be getting screwed. hehe It is nice to share photos and I am able to stream this blog to facebook so that facebook users who are my friends can link to me or easily reach this blog. We shall see if it's of future interest to me.