PREVENTS CONSTANT ACCESS A hacker may attempt to access your account more than once over a period of time. Changing your password often reduces the risk that they will have frequent access.
Unless there is reason to believe a password has been compromised or shared, requiring regular password changes may actually do more harm than good in some cases.
By recording your keystrokes, the hacker can steal your passwords and other sensitive data and use it to access your accounts, including email, social media and online banking.
Most hackable passwords
Second came “123456” followed by the slightly longer “123456789.” Rounding out the top five were “guest” and “qwerty.” Most of those log-ins can be cracked in less than a second.
Here's how: according to recent studies 81% percent of breaches at companies or organizations leveraged stolen or weak passwords (2020 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report) and one million passwords are stolen every week (2019 Breach Alarm).
By duplicating credentials, they can access additional accounts and expose even more data. Another problem is that when users are forced to create complex passwords, they find them hard to remember. As a result, they write them down or store them where they can be seen or stolen.
The reason for this is fairly simple. Sometimes you might never be aware that your password for an account was compromised. But by changing your password every few months, you limit the amount of time a hacker can spend in your account and hopefully minimize the damage a cybercriminal could cause.
Password length refers to the number of characters (letters, numbers, punctuation marks, etc.) in a password. Experts recommend using longer passwords when possible. The longer a password is, the more possible permutations it has, making it harder and harder for cybercriminals to crack.
But how often should you create new passwords? Cybersecurity experts recommend changing your password every three months. There may even be situations where you should change your password immediately, especially if a cybercriminal has access to your account.
A 10-digit password that only uses numbers could be cracked by a hacker immediately – while one made up of lowercase letters would only take a minute to guess. However, if you use upper and lower case letters, plus numbers and symbols, it could take a hacker up to two weeks.
In fact, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) states, Password length has been found to be a primary factor in characterizing password strength. To strengthen the security of your online information, ensure your passwords are a random mix of at least 14 to 16 characters.
pim recommends changing passwords every 90 days (about 3 months). According to Thytoctic, 80% of all cyber security attacks involve a weak or stolen password. Changing your password quarterly reduces your risk of exposure and avoids a number of IT Security dangers. Unfortunately, passwords are often neglected.
When sharing your password with someone else, you risk granting that individual access to every account you own with the same password — and probably even those with similar passwords. If one of these passwords is for a social media platform, an angry colleague could change your profile picture to embarrass you.
Because many people use weak passwords, brute-force attacks remain effective for hacking accounts. Attackers use an automated computer algorithm to rapidly try different passwords. Some brute-force attacks can attempt one billion passwords per second!
Using the same password leaves you and your information vulnerable to financial and identity theft Identity theftThe crime of impersonating someone and using their private information, usually for financial gain. , so it's important to use a unique one for each of your accounts.
While password rotation is a universally accepted security best practice, in settings heavily dependent on manual password management, frequent password rotation may actually increase the risk of an exploit.
The one truly safe solution is to have a different password for each and every account. If you have 100 accounts, 100 passwords really is the safest move. This is because hackers can find any online accounts tied to your email address, and will immediately try reusing any password across all your accounts.
Whatever your reason for doing it, reusing passwords is a practice best left behind. If accounts are compromised, cybercriminals can do a great deal of damage, such as committing identity theft, or stealing money and sensitive information from your place of work.
Attackers can easily identify and access internet-connected systems that use shared default passwords. It is imperative to change default manufacturer passwords and restrict network access to critical and important systems.
The easiest and most popular way to find out if your password is up for grabs is to check out Have I Been Pwned? (HIBP).
Tips for creating strong passwords
Never use personal information such as your name, birthday, user name, or email address. This type of information is often publicly available, which makes it easier for someone to guess your password. Use a longer password.
Use long, complex passwords that use spaces, capital letters, lower case letters, numbers and special characters. To make them easier to remember, consider using a sentence that has meaning to you.
A hacker needs only about 1 day to crack a seven-character password that contains only numbers and lower-case letters. This moves up to 40 days when the user includes capital letters. Increasing the number of characters in your password from 7 to 8, will force a hacker to spend almost 7 years trying to crack it.