KeepCalmLongPasswordsPasswords 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.

  1. 123456
  2. password
  3. 12345
  4. 12345678
  5. qwerty
  6. 1234567890
  7. 1234
  8. baseball
  9. dragon
  10. football
  11. 1234567
  12. monkey
  13. letmein
  14. abc123
  15. 111111
  16. mustang
  17. access
  18. shadow
  19. master
  20. michael
  21. superman
  22. 696969
  23. 123123
  24. batman
  25. trustno1