
Passwords are our most common way to authenticate on our day to day activities, even if it comes to email, work or personal accounts, computers or phones as they can be the main resource to stop hackers to access your personal information.
Our passwords must meet some requirements when it comes to complexity:
- Special characters: ‘<>,.?/ ~!@#$%^&*_-+=`|\(){}[]:;” if the site supports them;
- Uppercase letters;
- Lowercase letters;
- Numbers;
- Character length.
Having a password that mixes all of the above forces hackers to increase the number of computers to successfully find out your password. Taking them too much time to break your password can abandon that process and attempt another target. The right balance should be struck between creating an easy to remember password and making it hard for others to hack.
Is a long password the best approach? Maybe. Long passwords tend to be associated with a higher level of entropy, which is a measure of the degree of uncertainty in a password. Make sure that your password does not contain any sequential numbers or letters, and DO NOT use “password” as your password. Instead try creating a unique password without including your personal info such as birth date, your name. In an attempt to break your password, the hacker will use everything they know about you in their guess attempts.
One more action that we must ensure we use is MFA (Multi Factor Authentication). When using MFA, users must combine verifications technologies from at least two different groups or authentication factors. One of the most used type of MFA is Two Factor Authentication (2FA). The idea is that even if threats occur and hackers can impersonate a user with one piece of proof, they won’t be able to do so with tow or more.
There are multiple ways to implement MFA:
- SMS Token Authentication;
- Hardware Token Authentication;
- Software Token Authentication;
- Email Token Authentication;
- Phone Authentication;
- Biometric Authentication.
How long does it takes to find your password: