Passwords

1 upper case, 1 lower case, 2 special characters except for $_.* with a 10 character minimum….

We all hate them yet we all have them. Passwords. Contrary to popular belief they are not here to make our lives harder. The purpose of this article is to help you understand the importance of complex passwords.

Passwords are not all created equal. The best way to imagine this it like the classic game Hang man. For those of you who are too young to remember. In Hang man you had blank lines that you had to fill in with letters in order to guess the word. The less blank lines you had the easier and quicker it was for you to guess the word. Passwords are the same way. The shorter the password the easier it is for a hacker to randomly guess it.

Now you may be saying to yourself “what’s wrong with just 4 numbers between 0 and 9? That’s 10,000 different possibilities”! There is a program law enforcement uses that has been proven to crack a 4 digit pin in about 2 minutes. 10,000 calculations using a standard computer in just 2 minutes. Well let’s say you set your
password to “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” How long would you think it would take to crack that? 1 week? 3 days? 1 day? Try one hour! At a security convention a hacker cracked the above password in just 1 hour.

This goes to show a password is not going to stop every attack. A password is just your first line of defense. But the easier the password the quicker a hacker gets access. And the quicker a hacker gains access the longer they have to recover private data before you or your IT department notices.

If you fear your employees have too simplex passwords, contact us at Jeter IT today and we can perform a security risk analysis for you. And keep your data secure!