No matter how much you love your pet’s name, never use it as a password, cautions Kelly Merryman, president and chief operating officer of the Digital Security Company Aura. For starters, it’s easy for hackers to learn your dog’s name through social media posts.
“You just don’t think about the fact that when you tell stories about your life online, those are critical pieces of information that bad actors can find — and they can find it really easily,” she said in an interview with NBC’s TODAY show. “They don’t have to go on the dark web to find my pet’s name. They just go on my public Instagram.”
Data released by Aura via PRNewswire this month found 1 in 3 pet parents have used their pet’s name as a password for online accounts. Adding numbers — or substituting a dollar sign for the letter S or zero for the letter O — doesn’t offer protection since cybercriminals can program bots to try every number and permutation.
“Bots can be taught to operate very quickly and just push out every known version of a number before and after the name of my pet,” she said. “They can have hundreds of thousands of those running at the same time.”
So use your pet’s name to call them over for a treat — not to protect your online account.
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