Passwords are often the first and last defenses for organizations, banking accounts, medical accounts, etc. People love using the following for their password attributes, including:
- Using information from social media about what you “like”, ie. sports team, book titles, movie titles, etc.
- Using your favorite sports team or sport game
- Using an important date (birthday, anniversaries, important dates)
- Using swear words and profanity, including, but not limited to, profanity in other languages
- Using simple passwords from dictionaries that lack additional complexity including Upper Case, lower case, numbers, and special characters.
At Net Force, we recommend the use of passphrases instead of passwords. A phrase could be something as simple as “ILuvMyDaughter&Son:DianaandTim!”
It not only has length, but it also has complex elements that makes the brute forcing or cracking the passwords challenging, but not impossible
Great passphrases attributes include:
- Length – I mean longer than 14-16 characters. In the case of my example “ILuvMyDaughter&Son:DianaandTim!”, it comes out to be 31 characters in length (without quotation marks).
- Case Sensitive – It has a mixture of Upper Case and Lower Case scattered throughout the passphrase
- Special Characters – The ampersand and colon is scattered in middle of the passphrase. Using multiple special characters will always increasing the difficult of the password
For those of you who have a password on the following list, I think it is time to change your password.
- 123456
- password
- 12345
- 12345678
- qwerty
- 1234567890
- 1234
- baseball
- dragon
- football
- 1234567
- monkey
- letmein
- abc123
- 111111
- mustang
- access
- shadow
- master
- michael
- superman
- 696969
- 123123
- batman
- trustno1