World Password Day?

In honor of "World Password Day," we're providing some thoughts and tips to improving the security of the passwords you use. For better or worse (and in many cases it's definitely worse), passwords are still the primary authentication mechanism we use to control access to most computing resources. While multi-factor authentication is becoming more common (and it's a great thing to use if you can), much of our digital life still depends on the humble password.


Really I don't even like the name, "World Password Day," because I'm trying to get people to think of them as "passphrases" -- as in multiple words separated by spaces, meaning quite a bit longer than we are used to using. A natural-languge phrase is easy to type, easy to remember, and (if it's long enough) very difficult to guess or crack. When I say long, you should be thinking at least 15 characters long. Remember, spaces are characters, too!


Here are our key tips to make your passphrases more secure:
  1. Use different types of characters. This doesn't have to be hard -- natural sentences will naturally contain capitals letters, punctuation, and SPACES (remember, spaces counts as "special characters"). Numbers can be harder. Letting your numbers and punctuation fall naturally in your passphrase is better than just tacking them on the end -- most password-guessing software tries tacking on every possible number and punctuation mark the end of words it guesses.
  2. Don't recycle passphrases! I know we get told to reuse and recycle, but that advice does not apply here. If it's hard to remembers all those unique passphrases (and it will be), consider using a secure password manager to help you out.
  3. Most importantly, make your passphrases LONGER. "Longer is Stronger" or "Length is Strength" -- whichever way you rhyme it, it's the most basic mathematical truth behind strong passphrases.
Test your password knowledge by taking our password quiz.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weekly Infosec News Brief 20-26 July

Image
FBI Sees Massive Increase in Espionage, Including Industrial Espionage, Against the US The FBI on Thursday issued a press release discussing what they believe is an increasing threat of economic espionage against US companies. They estimate that such espionage may cost the US as much as "hundreds of billions" of dollars a year. This espionage is not just directed against large industrial companies, but any place where trade secrets and innovations might be found, including third-party organizations (e.g. business partners, vendors, consultants, lawyers, etc.) affiliated with targeted companies. A key take-away is that the threat is more widespread than most people think, and that few organizations are immune. https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-announces-economic-espionage-awareness-campaign http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/24/politics/fbi-economic-espionage/ Microsoft Releases Out-of-Cycle Patch for Critical Font Driver Bug A flaw uncovered in connecti
Read more

Weekly Infosec News Brief: 14-20 March

Image
Major Media Websites Caught up inNew Malicious Advertising Attacks Last week multiple major advertising networks, including Google's DoubleClick, AppNexus, Rubicon, and AOL were abused by attackers to serve up malicious advertisements on major media sites. These malicious advertisements were redirecting to the "Angler" exploit kit, which uses multiple means to attempt to compromise a browser and install malware. While such malicious ads are common on smaller websites, they are not unheard-of on major media sites. This outbreak, however, was unusually large and long-lived, lasting at least the better part of two days. Given how common malicious web ads are, some security experts are recommending the use of ad blocking technology in web browsers. http://www.computerworld.com/article/3044565/security/advertising-based-cyberattacks-hit-bbc-new-york-times-msn.html Malicious Macros in Word Documents Used to Install Malware with No Files Needed Everything old is new a
Read more

Critical Vulnerability Discovered in IIS 6.0 Web Services

Image
IIS 6, the version that runs on Windows 2003 Server, was revealed this week to have a serious vulnerability that could allow an attacker to run malicious code on the server. The vulnerability has apparently been known to some malicious groups for some time, as attacks exploiting this vulnerability have been observed as far back as summer of 2016. But last week a proof-of-concept exploit for the vulnerability was posted to GitHub, bringing public attention to the problems and providing potential attackers with a head start on developing their own exploit code.  That is likely to take this from a secretive exploit used by a few actors to one that will be widely used by many attackers, meaning anyone running a vulnerable server is a likely victim. Vulnerability announcements are common, but this one is especially problematic for several reasons: IIS 6.0 is a part of the Windows 2003 Server operating system, which aged out of support from Microsoft almost two years ago. There are an
Read more