Even though breaches are still going on, employees keep acting neglectful with their passwords. Denial, ignorance, and the fear of forgetting potential new passwords could explain this lack of vigilance regarding hackers and breaches.
How to create a strong password, both easy to remember and hacker-proof?
How Are We Still Letting Hackers Win?
Even though employees and Internet users are well aware of the danger that hackers represent, they still find ways to steal confidential pieces of information, and sometimes with a lot of ease. One of the reasons is that most users keep using the same passwords for every single one of their accounts: professional, personal, social media, etc. About 59% of Internet users always use the same password!
64% of Internet users admit that having a password easy to remember is more important than having a strong password. Most of them are more afraid of forgetting a password than actually being hacked. 47% of them feel the same indifference towards work-related accounts than personal ones.
It is interesting to note that most Internet users have a very laid-back attitude towards hacking. Breaches don’t faze them, even if their own company is being breached: only 55% of them would change their password after being hacked! Part of that attitude is due to laziness, the other part is due to the fact that we don’t think of ourselves as hack-worthy. Who would have thought that a little self-esteem would help us win against hackers?
What Passwords To Avoid?
Some passwords should be avoided at all costs, whether for their absolute lack of originality or the fact that their pattern is very simple to guess. If your password is among the following list, we strongly advise you to change it asap:
Most common passwords of 2020
- 5# 1234567
- 4# password
- 3# qwerty
- 2# 123456789
- 1# 123456
Of course, those are just the top 5. Lower in the list, we can find other witty passwords like ‘nothing’ or ‘secret’ or ‘password1’.
How To Choose A Password Both Safe And Easy To Remember?
A safe password is a password that a hacker won’t easily guess or crack using software tools. It must be unique and complex. Try to avoid anything that is directly linked to yourself, like your name or the name of your relatives, your phone number, your favourite colour, or something that is related to one of your hobbies or favourite fictional world. Keep in mind that hackers will check your public profiles like Instagram to try to guess your passwords based on what they can learn from you via your social media accounts.
Do use Two-Factor Authentification (2FA): you may use a password or pin number, the last four digits of your credit card, etc. Try also to use a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, symbols, and numbers, and make sure your password is at least 5 characters long. Avoid solitary words or common sentences like ‘Iloveyou’. If you really want to use this type of password, make it as difficult to crack as possible (for example, instead of ‘Iloveyou’, choose ‘EyEL0v3U’).
One trick to make passwords both safe and easy to remember: think of a sentence that you are familiar with, like the chorus of a song, or a quote from a movie. Then, use the first two letters of each of the words of the sentence, one in capital letter, the other in small letter.
For example, let’s take the famous sentence from Doctor Who: ‘Big ball of wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff’. The password then would be ‘BiBaOfWiWoTiWiSt’. You can still add a number at the end or a special character like a question mark to make it even safer: ‘?BiBaOfWiWoTiWiSt?42’. And voilà! A password easy to remember, but hard to crack!
Interested in Engineering? Check out ESILV’s programmes.
This post was last modified on 1 October 2020 3:11 pm