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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...

Numbers or pictures? Smiley face or thumbs up? Hackers have learned to adapt to the ways that online users create their passwords. Using common words, phrases, and numerical strings is clearly not secure enough these days. Ideally, a strong password is totally random; however, the stronger the password the harder they are to remember. This often leads to a weak password or the replication of the same password for every login. Enter the emojis as an potential alternative. The beauty of an emoji password system is that the picture is translated into characters by the log-in system, and each emoji may be comprised of a number of characters resulting in a lengthy password. The addition of emojis to our passwords would make it visually easier for the user while adding knock-out security due to the large number of characters for hackers to decipher. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-new-password-emojis-2015-12-29 http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/06/15/414742418/e...