Forget Everything You Knew about Safe Passwords

Forget Everything You Knew about Safe Passwords

Last month, the father of the 2003 NIST password guidelines said that he got it wrong and the way we are creating passwords to be a completely random string of characters and the frequency we change our passwords is making it harder on all of us but easier for cyber-criminals to crack.

The complexity of the old password guidance led to many bad password habits such as just replacing letters with the equivalent in numbers (‘o’ for zeros, e for threes, etc) and letters for characters (@ for a, $ for s) so that they could more easily be remembered. In fact, it was found that the standard eight-character password with special characters could be cracked faster than a 20-character password without special characters.

The old requirement to change passwords so often also led to many users simply reusing their passwords on multiple sites which again, made things easy for cyber-criminals when there was a breach. There has not been any evidence that your password becomes more hackable because it’s in use for more than 90-days. Plus, when we were forced to change our password too frequently, many times users would just shift one letter in the password which cyber-criminals quickly caught on to.

And believe it or not, a completely random password that does not use words are actually easier for hackers to crack than long, weird words or phrases that you can easily remember.

New guidelines throw everything we’ve been told to the wind like using a mix of upper & lower case letters, the use of special characters, and changing your password frequently. Now the password experts say that we should make our passwords long and memorable. Using a phrase that is unique to you, in conjunction of special characters if you are forced to use them (within the phrase, not within words), will make it harder for hackers and their cracking software to compromise your passwords.

Also, think about the system you are accessing and whether or not it needs a strong, unique password or is it ok to reuse a password for a site that just has your name, email, and password? For instance, do you really mind it if a hacker got access to your online recipe lists?

You might think that the password to your online bank is the most important password but you may be surprised to find that your email and social media passwords may be more sensitive because of the “Forgot Password” feature in systems that would allow a hacker that compromised your email account to reset your online banking access.

But passwords and one-time multi-factor authentication (like a SMS), are not bullet-proof protection as they can be hacked and hijacked. A recent, terrible example of account take-overs has been in the crypto-currency space where hackers are compromising email and mobile telephone accounts and emptying crypto-currency wallets. Users will need to continue to be vigilant and take every precaution to secure their most sensitive accounts.