It is a scary world out there. Citizens are fearful of physical attacks and cyber attacks by governments, quasi-governments and individuals. You just need to read the daily newspaper to reinforce the large numbers of the first five types of attacks. But how extensive are cyber attacks by individuals?
To provide some insight into this matter comes the “Best Hackers in the World” infographic. It seems to be somewhat benign overall. The “black hat” hackers received the consequences of their actions. The “white hat” hackers went on to become successful. It is interesting (and somewhat curious) to see that Steve Wozniak being listed as a hacker, although the infographic does describe an action that was of hacking. It may be somewhat disconcerting to read that two of the three “black hat” hackers also became successful after their ventures.
Everyone knows that you ought to have a “strong” password. But what is a “strong” password and exactly how good is it? The infographic shows that just simple things like making it longer (9 characters is apparently an extremely good length) and using the uppercase of letters makes it very time-consuming (and sometimes impossible) to bypass. Even better is to incorporate numbers and symbols. What is not mentioned, though, is that it still has to be something that you, yourself, can remember.
Likes: Some of the statistics seem somewhat outlandish, so it is wonderful that the infographic provides the sources.
Dislikes: It would have been nicer to see the extent of the aforementioned government and quasi-government cyber attacks, such as those of the NSA.
courtesy: gadgetsandgizmos.org