Your Weak Password Is Putting Your Business At Risk

January 8, 2009 By Jeremiah Staes 1 Comment

There’s been a string of reports of various hacks of web 2.0 services, or individual services.  Whether it’s Twitter, Ning, etc, I’m hearing many reports that, as I had in a Twitter conversation with @kenburbary, It’s “the year of the miscreant.”  (By the way, if you want tips to avoid Twitter phishing, jump here to his blog).

So let’s get very serious about passwords BECAUSE 2009 IS the year of miscreant.  Deadly, business serious, and I’m going to sound tough but the message HAS to sink in.

With all of this sharing comes a responsibility to yourself.  I know, it stinks you need to have a more difficult password, but here are some facts:

1) If your password is ANY word in the dictionary or a name alone, it is much easier to be hacked.  There’s a thing called dictionary attacks where robots/scripts/etc try every english word.

Knowing this information now, you are being negligent to your business if you use a dictionary word password (especially without anything to mess it up, like numbers or special characters interspersed) and putting your business and your personal brand at risk of hackers; not to mention the time to re-create any assets that live there.

2) Depending on the age or software of the online service, some passwords are case sensitive, some aren’t.  If you can, USE CASE SENSITIVE passwords as well to increase your security.

3) The longer your password, the better.  Seriously.  Do nothing under 8 – nothing we have is less than 16 characters.  Mission critical stuff is 64 characters (we have a CD for that – after all, if a hacker/miscreant has physical access to your machine, you’re probably toast anyway).

4) User gibberish.  It’s hard to remember, but like a bank account number, you’ll eventually get it.  Go to http://www.grc.com/passwords and get yourself a unique, up to 64 character one.

5) Don’t give out your password to anyone.  I don’t give out my password to any of the Twitter services; sure, it’s just Twitter, but it’s a very bad habit.  Some of these things could easily be started knowing that many times, people’s passwords are the same for everything they do, including more serious things like their online banking.

6) Every time something wants a password, question it, even briefly:

  • What is this service asking for my password?
  • Why is it asking for it?
  • Is it really the service or program I think it is?
  • Do I trust it?  And how do I know I can trust it?

Unfortunately, even with all of this, you not alone can prevent these things.  As the hack of Twitter showed, bad security practices are done even at the top level of many sites.  Listening to podcasts like Security Now! (where many of these tips are adapted from), I’ve learned that some banks, because their websites are only web front ends to an ancient mainframe, are only 8 characters, non-case sensitive, even if you put in more!

But doing some practical things, like outlined above, can significantly reduce your chances of being hacked.  Compromising sites today is less about technology and much more about social engineering and taking advantage of the trust we seem to have.

Filed Under: Advertising, blogging, Business, Love Your User, Online Marketing Fundamentals, Podcasting, Rant, Security, Social Media, Tips, Web Sites Tagged With: password tips, prevention, Security

Blogging and Podcasting as Cornerstones Of Your Social Media Strategy Speech at Podcamp Michigan

November 10, 2008 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

I spoke on Saturday at Podcamp Michigan, and thought I’d share the speech. Apologies for the audio, we weren’t individually mic’ed and I have a slight problem with pacing too much :-)


Podcamp Michigan – Session #3 from Coefficient Media on Vimeo.

P.S. – I really appreciate the opportunity from Mark who put this together, and apologies to the hardcore podcasting geeks who weren’t so into the “ROI” and “For Business” talks. I promise I’ll have something targeted for you next year, maybe bring Erik who’s the certified audio engineer of the group. Also, many thanks to the luminaries way before me, specifically Merlin Mann, Gary Veynerchuk, Chris Brogan, and countless others who have shared so much.

Filed Under: blogging, Business, Online Marketing Fundamentals, Podcasting Tagged With: blogging, podcamp, Podcasting, speech

Podcasting and Events Tip 1: Show Your Value

October 6, 2008 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

Podcasting and events go hand in hand.

There’s a few philosophical thoughts around openness, value, and content to get out of the way before actually podcasting the actual content of your event, however, you don’t need to get into that argument to still use podcasting (and I’ll make that argument later that you should definitely podcast your event and let it out there).

However, before you even open the doors, podcasting can really benefit you, especially tied in with other channels (both online and offline media).

Here’s a “for instance.” Let’s say you have a speaker series; ten speakers either over a course of a day or a course of a few months.

You should have a 5-7 minute interview done with your speakers to talk about what they’re going to cover.  Give your audience a preview of the awesome you’re going to give them, and build buzz.  If you’ve got a 10 speakers, start early to allow time for the information to percolate.  Ask good questions; a great interviewer who’s personable is really key.

If you can, put it as part of your blog (you don’t have a blog or site for your event? Well, we have another conversation we need to have).  Event attendance is all about showing value and building buzz… two things social media and online marketing are really good for.  Have an online registration form? Make sure it’s nearby.

All of this should be well-integrated so that someone who is only capable of internet browsing gets all of your content – and oddly, I’ve found over the past four years that simple is hard.

What are the results?  We’re pretty proud to have a 80% sell-out rate when we do it for folks.  Others do pretty well too.

One More Bonus: When you make reporter’s lives easier, they cover you more.  If they can click and get the gist of what’s going on at your event and the value, they’re more likely to cover you.  So it’s marketing AND PR rolled into one, which in a lot of ways is inevitable online.

Filed Under: Business, Podcasting, Social Media, Tips Tagged With: events, how to promote, interviews, Podcasting

Podcasting helps NPR ad revenue go up 2.5x and Rises as Growing Business

January 21, 2008 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

A quicky but goodie, sent to me from my good friend Shawn (get a blog, a Twitter, or something already!!!)

It highlights a few things – first, that NPR has leveraged podcasting to increase their ad revenue from $18m in 2002 to $46m in 2007.

Not to mention, there is room for independents, too. Wizzard says their network of 30+ podcasts is work $100m – and $300m if you include the streaming content.

In short, no one can say this is a record-in-your basement game anymore. It’s serious business. Multi-million dollar business, with access open to smaller publishers.

This AdAge piece brings up great points – that there is a large market for podcast advertising, and that in fact, podcasting your content can increase it’s audience.

As the TV networks have seen with video on demand and streaming video, they risk decreasing the size of a live audience that can be sold to an advertiser at a higher premium for the sake of making content available to consumers whenever they want it.

But the experience of ESPN’s “Mike and Mike” may change some minds. Traug Keller, senior VP, ESPN Radio, said the popular talk duo’s ratings on the 350 ESPN Radio stations actually increased after their show was made available on iTunes, XM and Sirius satellite radio.

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Filed Under: Advertising, Podcasting

Content Is The King

November 25, 2007 By Jeremiah Staes Leave a Comment

Well, unless you’re reading in Tennessee. As I remember from my trip to Memphis, Elvis is “The King” there.

But everywhere else, content is the number one thing that will make your online presence great, yet it’s the very last thing anyone seems to want to create.

It’s the number one project killer. Someone will want a website, podcast, or other piece of media – but have no idea what they want to say, even an idea of the message.

All too often, business, organizations, and entrepreneurs think that a list of bullet points suffice as what’s needed.

When it comes to product or service sites, commonly, it’s the lack of a clear value statement and making it about the visitor.

Other times, it’s doing meta overload and relying too much on others, creating too little unique, interesting content. After all, more and more web users are employing Google Reader, Bloglines, and other services to pull that content in for themselves, and the use of yet another meta-site is declining by the day.

It goes down to a theory you will see repeated over, and over, and over, and over again – it isn’t one thing.  It’s the combination of things that make interactive successful, and for the most part, there needs to be a significant majority if not all the part there for it to work.

Content is one of those parts.

Filed Under: blogging, Interaction Design, Podcasting, Web Sites
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