3 Password Tips to Help You and Your Organization Reduce Hacking Risk

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Last year, thousands of internet accounts were hacked, belonging to both individuals and businesses. Many of those victims could have been shielded with something as simple as a more complex password. Security Magazine recently released an article covering a NordPass study which revealed that the most common password worldwide is—you guessed it—"password.” The study shows that on average, “password” gets cracked in less than one second. It also showed that other popular passwords included “123456,” “guest,” and “qwerty,” all of which are very easy to hack.

Security leaders around the world need to encourage their employees to use better password practices.

Hikvision’s Vice President of Global Information Security, Chuck Davis, offers some advice on the best way to create passwords will help keep you and your company safer in this blog. Below are three tips for creating complex and hard-to-hack passwords.

Make Them Long: There is some debate over the best minimum length of a password. Analysis from security expert, Troy Hunt, has shown that many of the sites we use do not require very long passwords. However, data from Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) shows that the longer the password, the better. Even back in 2010, Richard Boyd, a senior researcher at GTRI said, “Eight-character passwords are insufficient now…and if you restrict your characters to only alphabetic letters, it can be cracked in minutes.” Another GTRI research scientist involved in the project, Joshua L. Davis, said that, “any password shorter than 12 characters could be vulnerable – if not now, soon.” As computing power increases, the number of characters in a "long password" will increase as well.
Use Multiple Characters: Use all four character sets including upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters or symbols. In most cases, spaces are also allowed, which means you can use a sentence as your password or passphrase.
Create A Unique Password For Every Login: Creating a unique password for every account is very important. Because most people don’t know why that is recommended, they tend not to follow it. The reason is that if an attacker discovers your password for one account, they are likely to try that password for other popular online services and could gain access to all of your accounts.

With so many data breaches happening nowadays, your account information has likely been compromised on at least one site. When those databases of cracked usernames, email addresses, and passwords are posted to the Internet, threat actors will take something such as a LinkedIn email address and password and attempt to use it on Facebook or Twitter, or financial, government, or other critical accounts. If something as simple as developing a system of complex passwords can help stop that from happening, why not do it immediately?

Learn more about cybersecurity in our online cybersecurity center.

Cybersecurity

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3 Password Tips to Help You and Your Organization Reduce Hacking Risk

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