Ady Purnama

In spite of a constant drumbeat of news about hacking and cracking computer accounts, users still are employing extremely common and obvious phrases as passwords.  A compilation of the most commonly used — and potentially most insecure — passwords seen over the past year was recently drawn up by Splashdata and reported in Mashable. Splashdata found that incredibly enough, the leading password in use today is the word “password.” Interestingly, number 4 on the list, the keyboard lineup of “qwerty,” is counterbalanced by item number 23, “qazwsx,” which is the first three rows of keys typed vertically.

The list closely parallels that developed close to two years ago by Imperva, showing that these terms never go out of vogue.

Here is this year’s list:

1. password
2. 123456
3. 2345678
4. qwerty
5. abc123
6. monkey
7. 1234567
8. letmein
9. trustno1
10. dragon
11. baseball
12. 111111
13. iloveyou
14. master
15. sunshine
16. ashley
17. bailey
18. passw0rd
19. shadow
20. 123123
21. 654321
22. superman
23. qazwsx
24. michael
25. football

SmartPlanet colleague Tuan C. Nguyen provides a surprisingly simple technique for deriving a strong password that makes it difficult for hacking programs to arrive at the right brute force combination — employing a symbol in combination with an upper-case and lower-case letter.

Not everyone thinks that strong passwords are the answer, however. In another study on passwords, a Microsoft researcher conducted a cost/benefit analysis of  efforts to encourage stronger passwords, and questions whether the costs of strong password management outweighs the benefits.

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Original Source
By Joe McKendrick | November 18, 2011, 9:54 PM PST

Nucleus Research, Inc. has released its top ten tech trends for 2012. We’re seeing a lot of the same predictions from the Gartner Symposium so IT pros would be wise to check these out for possible career enhancement.

1. The Productive Enterprise
Nudged by the ready adoption of Facebook, many enterprise software vendors are incorporating social capabilities to their apps. But, according to Nucleus, for every organization that has successfully adopted social capabilities, there are two that struggle to make it work. The biggest concern is that social media will leach productivity (like Facebook does) without adding to the collaboration wanted. Savvy enterprises will find a way to align social tools to support clear business purposes.

2. The cloud will change development
The cloud has made development faster and more iterative. When changes can be made on the fly, companies can deploy once and then adapt an app as business needs change. As we go forward, the cloud will make development more virtual. Crowdsourcing efforts and the integration of social networking tools into the dev environment will provide opportunities for developers no matter where they live.

3.  SAP will reemerge
SAP revenues have gone up and the company has introduced innovations in areas like mobile device access. According to the report:

We’ve started to see real traction with Business ByDesign. This is partly because customers that have growth aspirations are also risk averse given the economy. Also, cloud delivery makes Business By Design less onerous to support than traditional ERP deployments.

Nucleus also cites last year’s exodus of top-level executives to be a good thing for its future.

4. Going big
Nucleus thinks that tech buyers are increasingly “going to look at big vendors with an 80 percent solution versus a best-of-breed application that must be managed, integrated, and negotiated separately.”

5. More ways for everyone to manage big data
Nucleus recognizes that although big data is definitely being overhyped, “companies will soon make smarter decisions using analytics to comb through huge amounts of data.” (I recently ran a piece about how to get started in the data analytics field.) The report says that this is one area where we’ll continue to see innovation, like integration of field-programmable gate arrays.

6. Capital will move from labor to technology
While the unemployment rate will continue to hover near 10 percent, Nucleus sees technology hiring going up. A recent Nucleus survey (Nucleus Research 106, Nucleus 2012 IT spending survey, September 2011) found that technology spending is winning hands down. And there will be the need for people to support those technologies and to train end-users.

7. Smarter software
Nucleus says, “We expect to see more intelligent applications that search for and push information related to what workers are doing directly to their desktop, a rise in usability for analytical and text mining tools whose capabilities were previously only for the gearheads, and presence and location monitoring to drive new ways we interact with enterprise software.”

8. Labor will get optimized
Nucleus claims that workforce management software will change to show which employees are the most productive, show up on time, and create the least scrap. “Workforce management vendors such as Dayforce and Kaba are now delivering this data to managers by combining analytics tools with data gathered at time and attendance kiosks.” Slackers, beware!

9. Healthcare investment
Although the technology for moving paper health records into electronic form as been around for a while, Nucleus says that the availability of low-cost secure cloud applications such as those from Digitech Systems will drive significant investment in 2012.

10. Renewed focus on customer experience
Nucleus says it continues to see str5ong investment in CRM and related applications. They expect to see more investment in analytics, activity monitoring, and big data crunching as companies aspire to “the prefect combination of targeting, touching and treating their customers.”

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Original source
by: By Toni Bowers