Secret Lives

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:

"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 5^th 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."