Saudi Gazette If you have kept the same passwords for a long time to log into your personal e-mail account and other on-line electronic services, now may be a good time to change them. The director of the Center of Excellence in Information Assurance at King Saud University, Dr. Khaled Alghathbar, advises users to change their passwords regularly. His words of caution come at a time when information security specialists have recently noted a marked increase in the activity of hackers and in their ability to break into people's on-line social networking accounts in the Kingdom. “Choose a complicated and long password that consists of both letters and numbers in random order that would be difficult for anyone to guess or even think of. This simple trick will protect your private information. Be extra careful when picking your password as several hackers have been targeting personal accounts on websites along with e-mail accounts. One Saudi hacker claimed that he has access to more than 2,000 private e-mail accounts of people living in the Kingdom,” said Dr. Khaled Alghathbar. The hacker even had the audacity to publicly display the e-mail addresses along with the passwords to prove his prowess at penetrating the accounts. While studying the list, Alghathbar noticed that the vast majority of passwords used were too simple. We should all learn from this incident and improve our personal pin-numbers and passwords to safeguard our personal information. Alghathbar further explained the importance of weak passwords, “The Center of Excellence in Information Assurance at the university analyzed and categorized the passwords and we found that 150 of them contained no more than four characters. A whopping 1,488 passwords were made up of numbers only and 479 passwords were composed of letters only. A small number of passwords were very strong and consisted of a complex combination of letters and numbers. A large portion of the passwords were weak and very easy to uncover.” In addition, he warned against making the same password for a number of personal on-line accounts, such as e-mail, facebook, student accounts in college and university, and other on-line memberships. He recommends keeping a different password for each personal account and changing them to combinations that are more difficult to discern. __
