We understand that there is a trade off between choosing a complex secure password – and choosing a password that you can remember.
Regardless of the platform, a secure and sensible password is a must. A professional hacker doesn’t really mind whether you are accessing cloud, server, or desktop data. The software professional hackers use to crack your password is capable of making one hundred billion password guesses per second.
If your password contains 6 or less letters they could have access in 0.02 seconds.
However, if your password consists of 10 letters and numbers it would take 10.45 hours for a professional to crack – now that’s much better.
There are some simple things you can do to create and easily remember a complex, secure password.
If you are serious about security and your password includes a symbol of any kind, then you are much, much safer.
Using an unusual symbol and at least one upper case letter means a professional would take 54.46 years to crack it – that’s more like it!
Here are some simple tips for creating passwords:
- Complexity. Include at least one uppercase letter PLUS a symbol.
- Length. Make your passwords long with eight or more characters (preferably 10)
- Variation. To keep strong passwords effective, change them about every three months.
- Variety. Don’t use the same password for everything.
And to create passwords that you can remember:
- Complexity. Use numbers, symbols and characters in place of letters that they resemble e.g. Luc@5
- Length. Create length with combinations such as a baseword+location e.g Luc@5 + 4email
- Variation and Variety. Go with a theme for your ‘base password’ e.g. your favourite movie – Lucas, Fisher, Wookie and rotate these words every few months
And for goodness sake:
- Don’t write down your passwords
- And don’t use one of these ones…top 100 worst passwords
Abtrac KB# 2038