In our digital age, protecting our privacy and our confidential information, such as passwords, bank account numbers, social security numbers, and the like is extremely important. It is all too easy for hackers to break into our email accounts or computers and pry into our lives—or worse, wreak havoc upon them.
Like most people nowadays a lot of my life is online, in fact, as a writer I probably spend even more time online than the average person. I have three blogs and three social media sites that, among other things, I use to market my books. Over time, I have also collected several email addresses in an effort to keep personal and professional affairs separate.
Add to all this the banking, utility, and other sites, I have approximately twenty online sites to manage. Each of these sites has a password. I try to follow the advice on online passwords, something I can remember easily but is not obvious to a stranger (read hacker) like birthdays, addresses, etc. I also have a unique password for every site, and I changed passwords at least twice a year—less than recommended, but more than most people do, I’ll bet.
Thanks to modern technology your passwords can be remembered and are stored in a special file on your computer, secure unless a really savvy and determined hacker breaks into your operating system. I’ve found that this is all great until there is a catastrophe. When that happens, all bets are off and the security mechanisms are more bother than protection.
Case in point; my house burned in March 2021, and all the contents, including my computers, phones, and tablets went up in smoke. When I finally got access to a new computer the laborious process of logging on to all my sites began. Actually, laborious is not even a strong enough word. The process was torturous. It took me three months to get back onto all my sites, and one in particular was unbelievably complicated—almost impossible—and, in the end, not as secure as I thought.
I won’t name the site because I depend on it for a lot, but the process when you try to log on and you click on the ‘Forgot password’ link was like something out of a dystopian ‘Catch-22’ style novel. The first thing they asked was for the last password I used to access the site. If I had known that I probably wouldn’t have had to ask for a new one. A lot do that, though, so I just typed ‘don’t remember,’ and asked to try an alternate method to access the account. What I was asked for next amounted to torture. I was asked for the email addresses and subject lines of some recent emails.
Now, unless you’re a person who gets four or five emails a day from people you know well, how likely are you to have this information floating around in your brain? I’ll tell you, not bloody likely. The problem with this particular site was that if you could not answer that dumb question, there was no one you could contact to let them know your problem. No help line to call, no email address or even snail mail address to contact for assistance. After three weeks of trying and coming up empty, I just gave up for a while.
Only for a while, though. I’m from East Texas, the only place in the United States where people are more stubborn than those from Missouri. I decided to try another route.
One of my blogs was linked to this particular account, and I didn’t remember the password for it either. When I tried logging on and clicked on the ‘forgot password’ link, it asked if I would like to reset my password through the linked site. When I clicked ‘yes’, you’ll never guess what happened. Oh, you did guess. Yes, it took me directly to the site I’d been unable to access. Not only was I then able to reset the blog’s password, but the password for that site as well.
Which leads me to the issue that provoked this column. Online security. Sometimes it is so onerous it not only keeps hackers out, but the owners of sites as well. But there is, it seems, always an unlocked backdoor that allows the persistent to enter.
So, I’m now asking myself. In an age when cybersecurity is all the rage, and hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear of another cyber intrusion by hostile actors, individuals and nations, how do we secure our online presence without making it impossible to function?
Whoever comes up with the answer to that question stands to become richer than Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk combined. – NWI
