An article review.

Be forewarned, and have patience:  the author asks people for their passwords!!!!
Another one of those Dan’s New Leaf Posts, meant to inspire thought about IT Governance . . . .

What would raise the hair on the back of any information security professional’s head?

• A policy that requires employees to share their passwords.
• A person who makes a habit of asking people for their passwords?
• Digital Nudists?

Be careful forwarding this article to somebody who doesn’t want to take a lot of time. This is an article that, unless you read it carefully, comes off as if the author is encouraging people to share passwords. Once I finished the article, I myself was fascinated by my first my reaction, which was one of almost outrage. Still . . . . a policy requiring each employee to tell at least four employees your password????

But fortunately, and mainly because the article was sent to me by my friend Joe Cychosz, I kept reading. As painful as it was to read about a man who goes around asking people what their passwords are, for sociology reasons I suppose, reading the article was definitely worth my time. I learned more about passwords. For one, the article purports that the average number of passwords users use is 81. (I had counted 21 for the average teller but now that I think of it, that was about five years ago. Time for a re-count.)

But for two, if you want to reflect on what technology and our efforts to protect ourselves from technology has done to our society, this is a good read!

Click Here To Read the Full Article

The above is what we call an “Article Review.”  It is part of our attempt to help our readers find excellent reading materials to back up important technology risk management concepts.  We try not to include articles that are merely news or additional news about mainstream issues.  Instead, we try to highlight articles that our “typical clients” should be sure to read, or that are about concepts “outside the mainstream media.”  infotex does not intend to endorse views represented by the writers of the articles we review, nor do we try to keep our Clients aware of EVERYTHING.  For example, if a particular story concept is being reported upon in many different media sources, infotex usually chooses to ignore the story concept altogether, unless we can find a “unique take” on the story concept.

Original article by IAN URBINA  Video by LESLYE DAVIS