Categories
risk management

Low tech risks

High tech risks are out there, and are potentially serious, but low tech risks don’t go away, and may be just as serious.

For example, we learned recently that Edward Snowden managed to get hold of peoples’ user ids and passwords, giving him unauthorised access to some of the classified information that he then leaked.

I’ve worked in several organisations where it was standard practice for sysadmins to ask me for my password when they needed to fix a problem on my machine. I would always complain, but there was little I could about it: especially as in one case, you weren’t allowed to change your password twice within (say) three days. And there are any number of websites that first insist that you register with them in order to make full use of the site, then confirm your password by email after you’ve registered and, sometimes, whenever you change it. They are getting to be less common, but they still exist.

And then you get the problem of your bank ringing you up out of the blue, and asking you to confirm your identity. No, sorry, I don’t give out personal information over the phone to unknown callers.

It’s difficult enough to keep track of passwords without reusing them. I have a reasonably simple scheme, based on a standard stem with additions based on the site address, but some organisations insist on a rather longer password than I usually use, or require some special characters, or forbid the use of others. It’s especially annoying that the most fussy sites seem to be ones that aren’t particularly sensitive, in that they don’t have any personal information.

So I can’t rely just on my memory and use LastPass to record passwords, memorable phrases, dates, and answers to all those security questions that don’t actually have obvious answers.

In general, it seems to me that there are still too many organisations that don’t follow good practice, and require risky behaviour from users. Things don’t seem to change much: I’ve written about thisĀ before.