Tuesday Tip #2: Why not use a passphrase?

No one gets excited about typing in a long password to access websites.  Especially if it is something that they use frequently.  However, a lot of the things we access all of the time contain the most sensitive information about us that cyber criminals are looking to acquire. 

Using a long and complex password is a great way to help protect that information.  The longer and more complex your password is, the more difficult it is for a cyber criminal to use technology to “crack” your password.  In IT we call this a “Brute Force” password attack.

Here are some recommendations that will help you avoid a “Brute Force” attack

• Create long passwords – The longer the better.  The more characters there are in a password, the larger the number of computations a computer program will have to undertake to figure out what your password is.
• Create complex passwords – Use spaces, upper and lower case, numbers, and symbols to increase the complexity of your password.
• Use a passphrase, which is a sentence like password with the complexity mentioned above.
  • Example:  Cyber 22winAgiftfor#12PersontoWritemedirectly!!

Here is an interesting chart from Hive Systems, https://www.hivesystems.io/password-tablea, leading cyber security company, that outlines how long it takes for a cyber criminal to crack a password with “Brute Force” using current technology capabilities.