When you are asked to create a password – either for a new online account or resetting login information for an existing account – you’re likely to choose a password you know you can remember. Many people use extremely basic passwords, or a more obscure one they reuse across many sites. Our research has found that others – even ones who use different passwords for each site – have a method of devising them, for instance basing them all on a familiar phrase and making site-specific tweaks.
When the ten year challenge began doing the rounds on social media, people rushed to post profile pictures of themselves from 2009, side by side with one from 2019, to highlight how much they had changed (or not) in the meantime. It is estimated that more than 5.2m social media users participated in this challenge.
About a quarter of internet users use a virtual private network, a software setup that creates a secure, encrypted data connection between…
Instagram and Messenger are expected to inherit the end-to-end encryption their stablemate WhatsApp enjoys, but in the meantime if you’re using WhatsApp and an iDevice you can enjoy another layer of security: biometric authentication. Peeping significant others will soon need to find other ways to access bae’s messages.
As people increasingly buy and install smart devices in their homes, all those cheap interconnected devices create new security problems for individuals…