We humans are funny creatures. We’re intelligent, good-looking, sociable, and we’ve got a brain more complex than any machine built so far. It governs our sleep, our breathing, our reactions to the outside world – and to the interior – and behaviours like how to take turns in conversations.
Behaviours. We develop them from the moment we’re born, and they usually get more complex and nuanced, as we grow older. How do we keep up with all of them? The answer to that is simple: we form habits and become “simplistic”. Locking the house door and not remembering, leaving the car keys in the same place only to forget when they are placed somewhere else, entering the password of a social media account and not remembering it afterwards, the list of habits goes on and on.
For these every-day mundane tasks, the truth is you don’t pay nearly the same attention as when you’re doing something that breaks your routine. When you go on holidays and stay in a hotel, don’t you find yourself asking, where did I put the room key yesterday or where is the coffee machine, the bread and the butter?
Habits are little things that help us through the day triggered by a variety of cues from places, people and others’ behaviours. They bring familiarity, a sense of security and comfort, and they help our risk-averse mind too. Habits connect to memory and consumer behaviour, resulting in a lower attention effort.
During your usual work day, most things are scheduled and organised in some way. The time you get up, the morning coffee break, lunchtime, the time to leave the office (hopefully!). Similarly, as part of this always-connected world, you know that remembering passwords, the social media ones for example, can be a challenge. The fear of forgetting the correct password leads you to use the same, repeatedly. To make it even easier, our habit-driven brain thinks of passwords that are based on our tastes and preferences or personal relationships. If you crave football, it can be the name of your favourite club; if you are an I-love-my-family person, you could choose the first name of your sister or your son, for instance. We look for cues that help create patterns or brain automations.
While these habits are good for our memory and automated habits, they are also a trap: they make us predictable; they are the keys to opening the doors to a number of possible threats to our online identity and reputation. An always-connected society using ubiquitous and increasingly sophisticated devices invites cyber-gangs to become even more skilful. In this context, cybersecurity continues to grow in importance and the number of cybercrimes grows with it. Amidst more and more news about data breaches, we ask ourselves what’s cooking in the mind of a hacker, and how our habits make their sinister goals easier to accomplish.
Grab your pirate mask. This article is a trip to a hacker’s brain.