When you set up an account on any secure website, you've probably seen instructions on how to create a password, similar to these:

• Your password must be alphanumeric.
• It must be more than/not less than X number of characters.
• It must include/must not include special characters (with a list or examples).
• It must include at least one number and one capital letter.
• It cannot be any of your last five passwords.

The rules by which passwords are created have grown so much more complex that many companies have emerged whose main product is password management, generating supposedly unbreakable ones with differing combinations of letters, numbers and special characters. Of course, they are locked away in a master vault behind yet another password.

The obvious weaknesses of protecting a vault of passwords with a password should go without saying, which is one reason why many companies, including Apple, have moved into the biometric arena. Fingerprints or retina scans are next on the list of security barriers to our ever-growing data needs. Yet hackers continue to successfully traverse erven the tightest security measures.

Consider one of the recent, more public, hacks that happened last November when Sony Pictures was breached and confidential personal data belonging to Sony Pictures Entertainment employees and their families—among others—were disclosed in an attempt to force the company to cancel the planned release of the film, The Interview. The attack, allegedly by North Korea, was a huge affront to our freedom of speech, but happened because Sony, and almost everyone else, continues to rely on birth dates and pet's names to protect this valuable information.