If special characters are not allowed in a password, what hints do you have
to make the most secure password?
In this excerpt from
Answercast #34, I look at the most important technique for making a safe
password: length.
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You touched on the obvious answer, but didn’t explicitly state it.
USE UPPER CASE.
Many of the recently published hacks point out that most passwords are lowercase. Simply adding a mix of upper case letters to your password significantly reduces the chance of hacks, especially if they are not first or last letters.
As explained on Steve Gibson’s site, https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm, in addition to using at least one capital and one lower case letter, periods, commas and spaces are just as effective at adding length as special characters, and length is the primary protection. 123456 is trivial. 1 2 3 4 5 6 or 1.2.3.4.5.6. are not.
Dear Leo, you that Internet Safety cost U4 2,99 on Kindle, Kindle charge U4 4,99 for the book.
Regards
Hi,
I think that you have covered most of the issues re. passwords (apart from obvious advice such as not posting passwords over the net, not writing them down on “sticky notes” or not giving them to colleagues when you’re going on vacation).
There’s one thing I remember from long long time ago (i.e. the age of the Commodore 64 and the likes): using backspaces in such a way that on screen the characters following those backspaces SEEMED to be overwritten. Wouldn’t that be a good idea to implement on today’s sites or incorparate in enduser programs that use password protection? Perhaps someone might even earn a buck or two for writing the code, or even better: make it available to the general public 😉
Of course it wouldn’t keep malicious hackers from stealing passwords nor keep users and sysadmins from continuing “bad practice”…
Greetz,
Pat.
Leo,
As one of the more paranoid web users out here, I have pretty much stayed away from using my Hotmail account for anything really important because of their insistence on limiting passcodes to 16 characters. (Most of the passcodes for my other email accounts are 30+ characters.) And I’m also wary because of the frequency with which Hotmail accounts are attacked and successfully cracked (or hacked). I often think of my Hotmail account like my grandpappy’s old country house: Doors rarely locked (i.e. poor security) but no articles stolen. IOW, I feel like my Hotmail account isn’t necessarily *safe*; it’s just not (yet) targeted.
But you’re saying that 15-16 characters can actually succeed at being a good, safe, secure passcode these days despite all the brute force capabilities and such that exist ? You’d have no worries at all with a Hotmail account with such a passcode ?
14-Jul-2012