Why you need a strong password?

Why you need a strong password?

NordPass worked with a third-party provider to evaluate a database containing 275,699,516 passwords. Of those, only 122,894,788, or 44%, were unique. The others were repeats of common, easy-to-remember passwords that leave users highly vulnerable to online threats. Only 78 out of 200 of the most used-passwords this year were new. 

If your password is among the top 200, NordPass cybersecurity expert Chad Hammond encourages you to change it immediately. â€œMost of these passwords can be hacked in less than a second,” says Hammond. “Also, they have already been exposed in previous data breaches. For example, the most popular password, ‘123456,’ has been breached 23,597,311 times.”

This is why we need a strong password. Lets us look a sample strong password criteria from a famous account

1. Username should not be part of your password

People can get your personal details in many ways. The easy way to get someone's details is by social engineering. In this you don't need to be an expert in hacking, you can collect information from social media or by other social means.

For many organizations username is like the first letter of the first name and the last name. If you are using the same username in password, hackers can easily hack your account.

2. 8-64 characters in length

If you are using short passwords, it will only take seconds to crack your password. The picture below shows the time needed to crack a password.

3. UPPER and lower, number, special character

By adding this to your password it will increase the complexity of your password. 

Lets see what happens if your password is not complex

pass123 - This can be cracked using Brute-force attack. Brute force is an attack with the combination of letters and numbers. The more you mix up letters (upper-case and lower-case), numbers, and symbols, the more potent your password is, and the harder it is for a brute force attack to crack it.

I suggest to keep your password 15 character in length, UPPER, lower, number and special characters. Why do you want to take a chance? change your passwords ASAP!

There are many types of passwords crackers available in the market. I only discussed about Brute-force in this article. If I write about all password cracking tools, one article won't be enough.

Reference

https://blog.avast.com/strong-password-ideas#:~:text=The%20more%20you%20mix%20up,Avoid%20common%20substitutions.

https://www.betterbuys.com/estimating-password-cracking-times/