I don’t know about you but I’m sick and tired of passwords. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know how many passwords I have and there are some accounts that I refuse to touch as I don’t remember the passwords any more and if I touch them I know I will have to go through the process of identifying myself, resetting the password, and then changing adding the new password to the devices that connect to these accounts.

Then I have these passwords that I’m forced to change every so often and when I do, I cannot use previously used passwords, nor can I use common words and the same have to have a minimum number of characters, numbers, capitalize, and lowercase letters. Of course, who can forget about those that use multifactor authentication?

I vividly remember calling my insurance after a car accident from the Emergency Room. I had a concussion and a splitting headache, and my insurance wanted me to verify my identity after they sent me a text with a security code to the phone from where I was calling from. Think about it…..

Facts

  1. Most passwords under eight characters can be cracked in less than an hour using brute force software.
  2. Passwords are easily hacked because most humans follow similar patterns: 50% chance that a password has at least one vowel. Numbers that are used in passwords are usually the numbers ‘1’ or ‘2’ and are placed at the end of the password. Capital letters are usually at the beginning and are followed by a vowel.
  3. 90% of passwords can be cracked in less than six hours
  4. 18% of employees share their passwords with others
  5. The minimum password length experts now recommend to avoid being compromised by brute-force cracking is 13.
  6. In 2012, a password-cracking expert unveiled a five-server clustered computing environment powered by 25 graphics cards that could cycle through 350 billion password guesses per second.
  7. Experts say a great technique for creating a secure password is to use the first letter of each word in a phrase (esagtfcaspitutfloewiap). Mixing in a single random symbol (!*$@) dramatically improves security.

I’m still sick of passwords but I understand that as times are changing, I will have to choose between changing with times (creating more and stronger passwords) or move back to my cave.

For more information about passwords visit: https://epicompliance.com/resource-center.