honestly we all suck at passwords and yeah maybe you personally use unique
impossible to guess 50 character randomized passwords for all your
accounts but unfortunately you'd be the exception rather than the rule you
special little person you according to a 2019 google study about a quarter of
americans used some absurdly unsecured passwords like one two three four five
six and according to a different study from the same year around three quarters
of users in the us and canada reused passwords while around half only change
one character when they're forced to update their passwords and to be fair a
big part of the reason this happens is that the average person has so many
online accounts now that they can't keep their password straight and many people
aren't even aware that password management software even exists then you
have the fact that passwords sometimes aren't even stored on the servers
themselves in a secure manner all you need is to take one look at the
headlines about password dumps to see that but do we even need passwords at
all even though we're all still used to punching in passwords people in the
computer industry have been discussing eliminating them for quite a while now
back in 2004 bill gates himself pointed out that the whole idea of a password
was flawed for situations where a high level of security was needed
but if this is true what would we use instead microsoft
seems to think they've got it all figured out if you have a microsoft
account you can actually go into your settings right now and choose to convert
your account to password lists instead of using a password you can use the
microsoft authenticator app to secure your account each time you want to log
in you'll either get a verification code from the app or through sms or email get
prompted for a physical security key or use biometrics like Windows hello face
scan i'll tell you a little more after this message from our sponsor pulseway
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isn't just something microsoft is doing though it has stolen the headlines
considering it means you can go entirely passwordless on Windows many mobile apps
have allowed you to log in with a fingerprint after just a first-time
setup and the signs also point to google moving to a passwordless model with
those one-tap authentication prompts that show up on your phone possibly
being the way of the future in fact google builds security keys directly
into Android phones themselves in order to verify that it's actually you trying
to get into your own account of course even though none of this will sound
super novel to anyone who's ever used two-factor authentication as all of you
should be we probably still have a ways to go before passwords really become a
thing of the past while large firms like google and microsoft will probably lead
the way in implementing it it won't be trivial for smaller organizations to
switch all of their infrastructure over to passwordless especially as users
often have to log into multiple services that might not automatically play nice
with each other it's for this reason that it departments might be looking
more at a concept called the federated login which essentially means that one
login will get the user into all the services they need but this takes work
to implement and this isn't the only barrier to ditching our passwords if all
this sounds like two-factor authentication with you know one less
factor you'd be right although not having a password sounds super
convenient it has the potential to make things a massive headache if a user
loses their phone or their physical access token so cyber security workers
face a challenge in figuring out a practical way to verify a person's
identity if the worst happens personally i'm a fan of good
old-fashioned secret handshakes
so thanks for watching guys if you like this video hit like hit subscribe and
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