Quiz: Hacker vs. squirrel

Guess the villain — was it hackers or wild animals?

It’s no secret that cyberattacks can put factories, newspapers, ships, and the like, out of operation. But it turns out that hackers are not the only folks capable of wreaking havoc in the realm of critical infrastructure — we underestimate the power of Mother Nature at our peril. And we’re not just talking about cataclysmic weather events, but … animals and birds.

US information security expert Chris Thomas (aka Space Rogue) created a project, Cyber Squirrel 1, that demonstrates hackers’ insignificance in the cyberwars compared with tech’s real enemies: wild animals. The number of cases of our four-legged (and other) friends squirreling their way in and disrupting hi-tech systems runs into the thousands.

How do they do it? You’re about to find out. Take our quiz and try to guess which malfunctions were caused by a human cyberattack and which were the result of a furry black-op.

Tips

Cracked in under a minute: (nearly) every other password

We’ve revisited our study on the crackability of real-world passwords leaked on the dark web — originally conducted two years ago. The findings are sobering: nearly every other password can be cracked in under a minute, and three out of five take less than an hour. How can we move away from insecure passwords?

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