Why Choosing a Passphrase Keeps You More Secure
Last week, over a 100 million LinkedIn passwords were being sold online. How many times have you heard it reported and sent an email to change your password to your online email, social media account or shopping website? One hopes that your password isn’t Pa$$w0rd or some variation of the word password. Yet, so many do use it, along with “123456” or “football,” the seventh most popular password used. Adding an upper case letter or tacking a number on at the end of it, ends up just slowing hackers down by a minute. Using “brute force” software, hackers can make 8 million password guesses a second.
Using a single word for your password is about the worst thing you can do as on the dark web, hackers share the millions of passwords stolen in data breaches and add them to their default dictionary. Single word passwords are often the first to be broken in a brute force attack.
Experts agree that at a minimum, passwords should have 12-14 characters. A 14-character password could take 811 trillion guesses to crack. Complexity is not what gives you security – it’s length. This is where the passphrase comes into play.
Why Passphrases?
An article published in the Guardian recently noted that while “Guardian” would be cracked instantly, changing it to “IReadTheGuardian” might take longer than two years to crack. Increase the length of it to “EveryDayIReadTheGuardian” and it will take years to crack, according to experts.
If you want to make your passphrase more secure, add in upper case, special characters or numbers, the lengthier the better and you have a virtually impenetrable passphrase. Experts suggest a line from a movie, nursery rhyme, a favorite song, or a sentence unique to your life – “TheC@tJumpedOverTheM0on” would be virtually unbreakable.
In the era where passwords are stolen almost daily, and data breaches to major organizations occur more frequently than we care to admit, it is imperative that all attempts to secure your personal data is made. Safeguarding your work and personal network with services like Global Data Sentinel, but also securing your logins for social media, banking and shopping sites is also high priority. Protect yourself and your information by ensuring your passwords are impossible to hack, and protect your data with encryption software. Contact us to let us help you safeguard your data.