Confabulations

A report this week showed that in the workplace, loads of people aren’t safe online. They either open email attachments willy nilly, post confidential information onto the internet or use the same password for multiple websites.

Hang on…use the same password? No! Way!

I’m being sarcastic. Think about all the different services you use online – your email, your facebook account, your online banking, that world of warcraft forum you don’t talk about…the list goes on. Now imagine you have a job that involves using an intranet or some sort of online application – basically, most jobs nowadays. You’ll have a password for your computer, one for the intranet, one for more for secure documents, one for your work email…the list goes on!

Remembering all of these passwords is nigh on impossible. When you add into the mix the PINS for all your credit cards its no wonder even the best of us have ’senior moments’ at checkouts when we get our PIN number backwards or just type in “help”. That’s why the password for your telly box is 1234 – telly box makers understand that we can’t remember any more passwords so they give us a simple code that you just have to guess every time. It’s physically impossible to guess it wrong.

I know that online fraud is rife and we really should look after our security, but they need to invent something that does it for us. We are but frail beings and Wikipedia has taught us not to remember anything anyway. Either that or they need to let us go back offline – give us paperful bills and offline banking. We never needed passwords then, just a signature and no-one could be bothered to counterfeit those. Right?