CCSS: 6.EE.A.1, MP1, MP3, MP8
TEKS: 6.7A
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STANDARDS
Hacking Your Data
How hackers illegally access your personal information online
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Your personal information might not be so personal anymore. Last year, social media sites Facebook and Google+ announced that millions of users’ information had been accessed by hackers. Names, addresses, passwords, and more were exposed. Even the account of Mark Zuckerberg—the creator of Facebook-—was broken into.
Hackers are people who use computers to gain unauthorized access to data. The hackers took advantage of vulnerabilities in the computer code that runs these websites. They found places in the code where programmers accidentally left ways to access accounts without needing a password. In some cases, hackers took control of the accounts they broke into and used them to post misleading information.
Social media has become a part of everyday life, but this reliance on the internet results in more and more parts of modern life being hooked into the web. The number of internet-connected devices is predicted to reach 21 billion by 2020. These devices include everything from smartphones and TVs to coffee makers! Each one presents a chance for programmers to accidentally create vulnerabilities—and for hackers to get your personal information.
“Companies are hooking everything up to the internet that they can,” says Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at Samford University in Alabama. “But they’re not investing the resources to make sure what they connect is properly protected.” For example, many devices have the same default password. This makes it easy for hackers to guess.
Even when a device lets you set a password, reusing the same one can make things worse. According to a survey conducted by the cybersecurity firm LogMeIn, 59 percent of people use the same password across multiple devices and websites. If hackers access one device or account, they can easily break into many others.
So what can you do to protect your data? Setting up a firewall—a computer program that blocks unauthorized access—will help protect your home wireless network. You should also make sure to use different passwords for each account and device you own.
Use this information to determine how many different combinations you can make for each situation described. You will need to use a calculator! Record your work and answers on our answer sheet.
ATMs and some websites ask for a pin, which is a password made of just the numbers 0 through 9.
A. How many different possible combinations are there for a pin with 3 digits?
B. How many different possible combinations are there for a pin with 4 digits?
There are 1,000,000 combinations for an ATM pin. Write this as an exponent. How many digits are in the PIN?
Typically, social media sites require that users create passwords that include upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters like !, @, %, and &.
A. If one social media site requires you to make passwords with just the 26 lowercase and 26 uppercase letters, how many different possible passwords can you make using only 5 characters?
B. How many possible passwords can you make using only 5 characters if the site also allowed the numbers 0 through 9 and the 31 special characters in the passwords?
C. How many times more 5-character passwords can you make using numbers and special characters in addition to upper- and lowercase letters than just with upper- and lowercase letters? Round your answer to the nearest whole number.
According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, strings of words or letters of 18 characters or longer make the strongest passwords.
A. Imagine you made a password using only the digits 0 and 1. How many possible 18-character passwords could be made using only these numbers?
B. Based on your answer from part A, why do you think longer passwords (ones with more characters) are stronger than shorter ones, even without special characters?
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