Study: Weak Passwords Really Do Help Hackers

Why make it easy for them?

Published on February 9, 2007 By MySecret In Personal Computing

The school & numerous security experts recommend using at a minimum of 8 characters & including 1 uppercase & 1 uppercase. Also use at least 1 punctuation symbol or a number.

This report was done using Linux systems but the recommendations are effective for all operating systems. Let's not make it so easy for these hackers to wreck havoc on our computers. After all you paid for that computer and put time and effort into customizing it to your liking. Let's take the power out of the hackers hands and keep it in ours.

It's My Secret

Comments

on Feb 09, 2007

Me? I usually use in least 8 digit, a number, as well as one 'special' charactor.

MasonM

on Feb 09, 2007

It never ceases to amaze me how many people use very weak passwords in this age of abundant security information.

I never, ever use a password that could be cracked with a simple dictionary attack. My passwords are always a combination of upper and lower case letters, always at least 4 numbers, and at least 2 punctuation marks. They vary from 10 to 15 characters.

thomassen

on Feb 09, 2007

Bring on biometric identification. That's what I think.

drej16

on Feb 09, 2007

The part that really gets me is how many applications still allow passwords that are only four characters in length or those that do go up to 8 charachters, alpha and numberic only with no special characters allowed and treat uppercase the same as lower case.

With all the current publicly available snooping and hacking tools, I like at least 15 charachters with a good mix of uppercase, digits and special characters. If you really want a good idea of how good your password is take your 'good' passwords and run rainbow crack against them with a built datafile, it will get most of them without even trying.

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