Hey,
I'm back. And I'm happy for I'm back home.
I'm excited to share the stories that I have gathered all along in the past year.
Beginning with the latest one. I recently gave a speech at my Toastmasters club. I have reached the level 7, Project 7 as they call it here.
Here's a draft of what I spoke:
I'm back. And I'm happy for I'm back home.
I'm excited to share the stories that I have gathered all along in the past year.
Beginning with the latest one. I recently gave a speech at my Toastmasters club. I have reached the level 7, Project 7 as they call it here.
Here's a draft of what I spoke:
"It was the fateful day of 9/11. Two planes flew right into
the twin towers. As the whole world saw the towers crashing down, there stood a
man.
Howard Lutnick. The chief executive of one of the world’s
largest financial-services firm, stood, watching 658 of his co-workers,
friends, including his own brother being burnt to ashes. As much as he was
grieved and pained by the sudden, catastrophic loss, one of the things on
Lutnick’s mind was passwords. This may seem callous but it was not.
Fellow Toastmasters and dear guests.
The biggest threat to the survival at that point, became
apparent almost immediately- no one knew the passwords for hundreds of accounts
and files that needed to get back online in time for reopening of the bond
markets. The attacks also knocked out one of the company’s main backup servers.
To crack the passwords, the Microsoft technicians performed
“brute force” attacks, using fast computers starting from the alphabet “a” then
work through every possible letter and number combination before ending at
“ZZZZZZZ”. But even the fastest computers working through trillions of
combinations, could take days. Even a day’s wait was unaffordable. Wall Street
was not going to wait.
If you were a part of that team, what would you have done?
Microsoft technicians took advantage of two facts:
1.
Many people use the same password for multiple
accounts.
2.
These passwords are typically personalized.
The technicians explained that for their algorithms to work
best, they needed large amounts of trivia about the owner of each missing
password. The kinds of things that were too specific, too personal, and too
idiosyncratic for companies to keep on file. Even though it’s these details
that make people distinct, that make them individuals but back then it was the
reason for chaos. The officials of the organizations soon found themselves on
the phone, desperately trying to calm their own agony while calling the
spouses, parents and siblings of former colleagues to console them, ….. and work
their way through a checklist that had questions like- “What is your wedding
anniversary?”, “Tell me again, where he went for undergrad?”, “You guys have a
dog, don’t you? What’s his name?
Remember, this was less than 24 hours after the towers had
fallen. The fire department was still referring to it as a search-and-rescue
mission. Families had not accepted their losses. Forget about answering the
questions and breaking the passwords.
The tendency of employees being lazy and choosing a simple, “weak”
password, that day ultimately proved to be the organization’s only saving
grace, helping them crack it easily.
As I completed reading the case study, I was myself drawn
into the stories of my own passwords. Not forgetting the strain it takes on my
mind remembering all of them but also the extreme irritation whenever this expiry
notification pops up, “Your account password will expire in the next 5 days”.
Like most of you, I always change my password on the 5th day. Never
before that.
But there is more to the passwords than their annoyance.
Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, emotions, mischief, and
sometimes even poetry. They derive from anything- horoscopes, an inside joke
with ourselves, a lost love, a defining emotional scar. And we try our best to
hold onto these, not letting a story, love, idea, person go away by keeping
them close in form of our passwords. Like a tattoo on a private part of the
body, intimate, compact and expressive. Often though, the story behind these
passwords has an emotional edge to them.
Fiona Moriarty, a competitive runner had “16:59” as her
password— her target time for the 5kms on the track.
Data suggests that setting your password to something is
also a unique way to remind yourself of the goal you have to achieve. Have you
ever done that?
While I was doing this research, a person I got into a
conversation with around passwords, George mentioned how setting his password
to “Meditate@Today” set a reminder for him to continue the momentum and
eventually build a routine around it. Because his computer demanded that he
changes his password every 30 days, he moved to other goals, “LearnCalligraphy”,
SUCCESSFUL, “GoForASoloTrip”, SUCCESSFUL, “CompleteTheCC”, SUCCESSFUL, “LooseWeight”,
IT NEVER WORKED, HE’S STILL FAT. :D
Some people even set passwords that are reminder of what
they have achieved.
Stuck in a middle of traffic jam in Bombay, I sat next to a
chatty man, Mr. Sinha, who judging by his expensive watch and suit, seemed to
have done well for himself. We made a small talk about our jobs, and eventually
I told him about my interest in passwords. After a long, silent look out the
window, he turned to me and said that he typically uses “83.59” in his
passwords. This was his CAT score and he liked reminding himself of it because
he took a certain satisfaction in how far he had come in life in spite of his
mediocre showing on the standardized test.
Passwords may not completely bare our souls, but these
passwords do represent pages, or perhaps pieces of pages, torn from our mental
diaries.
The fact that we construct them so that we and only we will
remember them makes it a unique take on the secret lives.
Try asking someone their password and the rich back story
that it holds in it. Because it’s not every day that you stumble upon a
conversation topic that teaches you new things about people you’ve known for
years.
Or maybe look back at your own passwords and the stories
they have been holding in them.
Who knows, your password may contain a story in itself that
you may narrate to your grandchildren."