What is 2FA, and why do we need it?

In today’s cybersecurity landscape, threats are everywhere, and keeping user accounts secure is a constant game of cat and mouse. In the early days of the internet, having a password like “ilikepie” wouldn’t have been a problem, but this is no longer the case. In the modern internet, hackers use massive lists of passwords to attempt to brute-force the login you use for the services you use every day. Or they’ll use automated systems to try to decrypt the securely encrypted password that your services are storing. With enough time and computing power, any password can be cracked. No password is truly invincible.

When it comes to networking, one of the terms that gets thrown around super often is the OSI model. But what is the OSI model? Well, the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model refers to the theoretical model for the internet put together by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization). It is an attempt to categorize how networks should work, from what end users see all the way to the wires the communication is happening on. Unfortunately, it happened far and away from when and where networks were actually being built. Hence why we’ve got the TCP/IP model, which more closely represents how networks in the real world work. Then why learn the OSI model? As it turns out, the OSI model being a formal declaration makes it really easy to standardize and build coursework around.

Friends, romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. It’s been a while, and in case you aren’t aware, I’m TheITFirefly. When I started this blog about a year ago, I wanted to provide a place that would help teach people learning technology concepts that I’ve learned in my major, at a level that they could understand.

As it turns out, that is far harder than I could ever believe. Not only did I have to develop my technical writing skills, but I needed to be able to put myself back in the mindset of a beginner. I wanted to post regularly, but in this regard I have failed. So it’s time to do a postmortem to avoid this again. So what happened?