Let’s face it, none of us love passwords. How many times have you tried logging in to an account only to be faced with the message: that password is incorrect. Research suggests that consumers spend on average 12 days of their lifetime trying to remember and reset passwords.
But passwords aren’t just time-consuming and frustrating. They also pose several security issues. It’s widely acknowledged among security experts that we need more secure ways of protecting our digital identities and online accounts. We’ll examine what this might involve. But first, let’s take a look at why it’s time to ditch passwords for good.
Passwords are out-of-date
The first password is thought to date back to 1961 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As part of MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System, all students were given a secure password to log on to the computer, to ensure that everyone had an equal chance of using it. But students quickly figured out they could hog more computer time by hacking the system and printing out the passwords. It became clear quite quickly that the password approach wasn’t foolproof.
Yet today, we’re still using pretty much the same system that was invented back in the 1960s. We’ve seen a huge amount of digital innovation and transformation over the last 50 odd years. But passwords have hardly changed. What other digital method has stuck around for so long?
Passwords are easy to hack because….
