14 million hacked passwords could have been secured by a biometric logical access solution
14 million hacked passwords could have been secured by a biometric logical access solution
Forbes Magazine reports that a Canadian researcher has posted over 14 million hacked passwords to his website. The lesson, according to Ron Bowes, is to replace passwords with biometric authentication.
Canadian researcher Ron Bowes has created a sort of Wall of Sheep for the entire Internet. By simply collecting all the publicly-spilled repositories of users’ passwords from recent hacking incidents, he’s created a list of stolen passwords on his Web site–14,488,929 distinct passwords to be exact, collected from 32,943,045 users.
But the real solution to prevent passwords being hacked, Bowes writes, isn’t to require users to pick convoluted, non-word passwords they’ll forget or have to write down. Instead, companies whenever possible should use “multi-factor authentication.” That means giving users a token with a changing random number, using biometric tests like fingerprints, or sending a text message to a user’s phone to authenticate him or her. “Passwords are well and good for low-security applications, like forums,” he writes. “But there’s no way I should be able to log into my banking site with just a password.”
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