What to watch out for and how to make them stronger?
Beyond the fact that you should not use passwords such as “123456”, there are also some passwords that you think are difficult, but they are much easier for hackers to crack than you think.
All codes could be said to be an easy target for hackers, even though each has a length of nine or more characters and contains a mix of letters, numbers and symbols. So how can these seemingly strong passwords be so weak and how can a hacker find them?
The most likely scenario is that they will steal them via a breach from a customer database, as recently happened with Apple's iCloud and the huge scandal involving naked photos of Hollywood stars. Given that many passwords are stored in a way that cannot be read directly by ordinary people, hackers often use software to crack them.
In a 2013 study for DARPA (Federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) the security consulting firm KoreLogic found that among the thousands of users in the sample about half had relied on just five patterns to create their passwords and 85% had relied on 100 different ones.
These are the three most common patterns that the research found to be trusted by the majority of users, and if anyone uses them, their password breaks very easily:
• One capital letter, then five lowercase letters, then two numbers (Example: Dulith57)
• One capital letter, then six lowercase letters, then two numbers (Example: Abugmar64)
• One capital letter, then three lowercase letters, then four numbers (Example: Itio1981)
What are the mistakes you make:
• Start with a capital letter and continue with lowercase letters
• When a password is not long enough, add one or two random letters
• Put numbers, two or four, before or after the letters
• When a special character is required, use the exclamation mark (!) and especially put it at the end
• Do not use two special characters in the same password
How to create stronger passwords:
• Avoid starting your password with a capital letter or maybe even without a letter at all
• Create an acronym using the first letter of each word in a sentence that you won’t forget. Example: t2cmlp,@yh from “Try to crack my latest password, all you hackers.”
• Resist the natural urge to use key words and phrases
• Put a lot of special characters in the same password
• Don’t put numbers next to each other
Source: protothema.gr
