TECH

Why your passwords are not strong enough - and what to do about it

Passwords are the gateway to most of our online accounts, from social networks to email platforms, but do you know if the ones you're using are strong enough to withstand repeated hacker attacks? If you want to know how to do a password security test and the best combinations to keep your data secure, we ask the experts to explain it to you.You may already be familiar with some advice that usually comes up whenever you create a new account somewhere: Keep your password long, complicated and difficult to guess. What you may not know is why these rules make a strong password, and how even the best password policy can cause problems for users.There are a number of ways your password can be exposed, explains Bruce Marshall, security consultant and founder of PasswordResearch.com: Including simple guesswork, using a phishing attack to get you to a compromised site, or using a brute-force attack to try a large number of combinations in quick succession (which many applications and sites now prevent from happening).Add to this the invisible malware that can 'watch' you by entering your password after installing on your system, plus the very real possibility of password database intrusions into services with inadequate security measures, and you can see your personal collection of numbers, digits and special characters being attacked from all sides.

Because of this, you need to keep your computer safe, make sure you only use online services that have strong security, and invent passwords that are not predictable, guilty, or easily broken, says Marshall. a long and complicated password, because a 4-character password offers fewer combinations than a 14-character password.
Do not use your name, do not use your date of birth (especially if it is openly shown on Facebook), and do not use your pet's name (especially if it is scattered on your Instagram). Length is important (14 characters is a good basic minimum), but keeping your passwords hard to guess is even more important."Hackers will not blindly test all eight-character passwords and all nine-character passwords," Jeffrey Goldberg, security expert for 1Password's password manager told Gizmodo. "They guess the most obvious before. These hackers know more about how people create passwords than anyone else. "In other words, password hackers know that everyone is encouraged to add letters in the upper and lower case, plus symbols, and they know the character patterns that users usually use by default: "MeDeixaEntr4r" is not much stronger than that "MeDeixeEntrar" and "Password!" is not much better than the bad "password". You may even think you're being smart, but many users follow this same route.

As research from the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University has shown, it is difficult to judge the effectiveness of any password policy when humans are such predictable beings. Tell everyone to use a number and they will tend to use the same number in the same place; tell everyone to use capital letters, and they will probably put them in the same places as well.This is not to say that there are ways to make your password more secure longer and difficult to guess -senhas are safer, and the Carnegie Mellon University has made available an online password strength checker that you can use. Write a password example and you will be warned if you put your uppercase letters and symbols in the same place as everyone else, or if you are using dictionary words (very easy to guess).The online verifier gives a detailed return of your password based on a neural network based on millions of samples. However, even the strongest passwords are not enough nowadays, and this is something that all our security experts agree on. If you only use passwords that you invent, you are the perfect target of hackers.

The problem with passwords
The problem with the strongest passwords is that they are too long and too difficult to remember - this makes them hard to guess, but also makes them more likely to be written on a piece of paper (ready for anyone to pick up) or reuse them through several of our accounts (meaning that entering the weakest gives access to all the others)."Remembering complex, unique passwords for every online password is not natural and can result in users creating shortcuts at the expense of their own security: Reusing passwords, using passwords, or using identifiable information in their passwords," said Steve Schult, senior director of products at LastPass LogMeIn developer, told us.In other words, the rules that govern the creation of the strongest passwords are not the rules that humans can easily follow-at least not without compromising security otherwise, or forgetting their passwords on a daily basis.

Changing the password regularly is another example of this. In theory, it's a good idea to keep hackers out of their way and ensure that data breaks on old accounts do not affect new ones; in practice, becomes part of the problem of having as many passwords to deal with and leads people to choose weaker options. As a survey has shown, even the way you change passwords is predictable, since we changed numbers 1 to numbers 2 and so on.Also remember that the same computer processing capability that is being used to recognize our voices and provide us with useful Netflix recommendations is also being used to generate passwords for hacker attacks.Several of our security experts have indicated the password in phrase as the strongest possible option: a random collection of words, sprinkled with capital letters and symbols that do not follow typical patterns (like having the first capital letter and the last character being a symbol). But you would need a phrase password for all your accounts - each one.

Gizmodo.com