sircaliban

I hope all of my friends on the east coast are able to ride out the hurricane without any issues.

Seriously, you are in my thoughts and prayers.

I've been using the same password on my yahoo email account for about 14 years. And as far as secure passwords.. it's a pretty secure one.. Up until Monday morning. The password was stolen. And I knew about it within 5 minutes, because a friend logged in and sent me a message. His message was.. "I just got spam email from you at my work email account. change your password."

I logged into yahoo email servers and it took me to a page that said. "we have noticed some unusual activity on your account. Please consider changing your password. " Below that message, it showed me a list of places I logged in from. Sure enough.. about the 2nd or third entry was flagged as unusual. The login came from Mexico. Clearly, that is unusual since I logged in from Ohio only an hour before, and I didn't have any time to travel there!

The hacker, or other person.. used my password, logged into my yahoo account and sent a spam email to my entire contact list.

After changing my yahoo password, I pondered what to do. I read an article recently about how easy it is for hacker/crackers to get passwords.(here).

There's the possibility of using a program like lastpass, which stores all of your passwords and can generate 'secure passwords' for you. Until that system potentially gets hacked and the computer hacker via your master password gets all of your passwords, not just one.

The purpose of a password is to help the owners of the servers/systems (facebook, yahoo, google) identify who you are so they can present the information you need back to you. We are entrusting the IT people to securely safeguard our passwords. We don't know how they do it, we don't know if the site is using a salted password or not, we don't control if they are using inferior encryption methods to store our passwords. Basically some sites might not be as secure as others..

What I decided to do after changing my password... was to enable 2 factor authentication on sites where that was available (yahoo, facebook and google). Basically, I sign in with my password, and then the system sends a text message to my phone with a code that I have to enter into the system. Here's Google's explanation of how 2 factor authentication works.

Not all websites I use have this functionality.. Dreamwidth/Livejournal don't. Dreamwidth has a suggestion box ( (dw-suggestions.dreamwidth.org/1383224.html ) that I put my idea in as a suggestion.

To me, the information I store on livejournal or dreamwidth is personal.. more personal than what I might post to facebook or twitter.  As such, I would hope that sites like livejournal or dreamwidth would provide options to ensure that it's actually me accessing my journal.. and not some hacker who's some how managed to crack/hack/obtain my password.

There are certain points in time in which you never forget where you were or what you were doing.

Some examples of that for me have been:

In 1986, specifically January 28, 1986, the Shuttle Challenger exploded just 73 seconds after liftoff. . We had kids in our school watching the liftoff. There was a teacher aboard the shuttle ( Christa McAuliffe) as part of the 'teacher in space' program. It was my understanding she would give some lectures to classrooms accross the US. I remember I was in class at the time, and I couldn't believe that the shuttle had actually exploded. I didn't believe the other kids when the 'rumor' that it blew up made it's way to my ears. After I saw the explosion on tv later that day.. all i prayed for was that those astronauts survived. As time passed, it became clear that my prayers would be unanswered.

My Grandfather worked for Morton Thiokol at the time. He did not work on the boosters rockets for the shuttle though.

January 31, 1986.. just days after the challenger exploded. North East Ohio had an earthquake of the Magnitude of 5.0. the Epicenter of the quake was somewhere near Leroy, only a few miles from where we were. It was almost time for lunch, and I was in Band class at the time. The earthquake caused the floor to shake and roll. I ended up sitting down in one of the larger instrument cubbies at the back of the classroom. Kids laughed at me for sitting down in there, but I thought it was the safest place for me to be.

And then, there's September 11th, 2001. It's a day that I cannot forget. I was working at Akron General at the time and I was on my way to work. I had heard on the radio that a plane had struck one of the twin towers and that there was a fire in the tower. When I got to work, we turned on the tv.. and watched in horror as a second plane hit the other tower. We watched it get worse as we saw tv cover the smoke billowing from the pentagon. And we heard of another plan that was headed towards washington, from Ohio.. That eventually was downed in PA.

Sept, 11th has changed America forever. No longer can we walk our loved ones up to the gates at an airport. No longer can we be ensured that some government agency isn't monitoring us for terrorist actions. Every american that I know, has in some way or another had their lives altered on 9/11/01. We no longer have as many freedoms that we used to have.

On that day, we lost 2,753 people to the attacks when the towers fell. It brings great sadness to me that there are people in this world that hate so much that they could do something so horrible.

I'm grateful for all of the people who work so hard to make sure that we
are safe. But it's unclear to me if my generation will rise to meet the challenges we have before us. There is much work to be done, and at a certain point, we have to set aside our differences and make this world a better place.

I would like to say that we have made the world a safer place, but I have a feeling that we are just starting off on a long journey, that we really aren't prepared for.

So.. remember my friends, that I love each and every one of you. And my advice for you today is..

Stay Calm and Don't forget To be Awesome.

DFTBA, my friends. DFTBA.

I just had to share.

I'm posting this partly for me, and partly for you, because I feel that this is important. And I believe there's a bit of awesome in all of us.