Passwords
The password is your first line of defence. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a business or your personal life; a strong password is a necessity. The harder the password is to break, the more an intruder will be discouraged and will go elsewhere.
If you bank online, use an email account or have a network set up its certain that a password is required. Consider the damage that could be done if an intruder could simply open up the website, click on your account and go straight in. Money could be stolen, personal and sensitive emails could be read and your business and personal life could be heavily disrupted. With a weak password in place this is a reality.
Intruders don’t always need sophisticated hacking tools to discover a password, many passwords are easily guessed using a little information regarding their targets background. Many employees use passwords such as their first, last or child’s name, or the name of their favourite sports team, some use the word “password” and others choose repeated characters such as aaaaaaa or ZZZZZZZ.
For a password with six letters all of the same case, there are 308 million possible letter combinations. This may seem like a lot but a hacker using readily available password cracking software can check all the combinations in less than 3 minutes.
If the password is then altered to include both upper and lower case there are now 19 billion possible combinations but increasing the password to 8 letters and the password now has 53 trillion combinations.
A strong password will be at least 8 characters long incorporating upper and lower case letters, a number and a special character such as !@#$%^&*,;". Utilising all these characters will give your password 6,095 trillion combinations that whilst still beatable is going to require much more time and effort from the hacker.
