What’s In a Password

Everyday we hear about a new major hack in the world.

• Home Depot
• Target
• Social Security Administration
• DNC
• and on and on…

Customers ask me all the time, are we secure? Are we safe?
My response is, if they can hack companies that pay millions on security then they can hack you. Now I don’t say this to scare people, but rather to put things in perspective. If your device is connected to the internet, and someone has enough motive then you can be hacked. That does not mean give up and what’s the point than mean you have to be very diligent.

When it comes to passwords humans are amazingly predictable. They either use no security or very poor security. Even though websites constantly post the worst and most popular passwords, people continue to use them. Whenever I visit a new customer I’m amazed at how often I can guess their password. A favorite of course is… “password”.

So now lets learn how to do better. Making a strong password is not hard, but it is annoying. The more annoying the better it is. Thats the whole point. Most systems will tell you how they want the password or the complexity that you need to use — upper and lower case, alpha numeric, with or without certain symbols. So for the sake of working with almost any password system lets keep it strong yet simple. Apples Safari browser now offers strong random passwords in the format of xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx.

So for example:

3MDr-4kDt-j0eM-1vX5

Notice the password is completely random letters and numbers with random case. This is a strong password in today’s world.

Now most people will look at that and say “are you crazy?” I can’t type that every time I need to log in! Well you don’t have to every time. There are several options that will help and you can get creative. Say it’s your banking you need to have high security on, then you can make a folder on your computer that has this password as the folder name so that you can just copy and paste when logging in. You can store it in a word pad or sticky note, that only YOU know what the code belongs to. So don’t label it banking password!!!

The longer you make the code the stronger it is. Similar to what sites mean by 128bit or 256 bit encryption. The longer it is the more computing power it takes to crack the code.