Over the past few years, Internet users have become smarter. No seriously. If earlier my friends complained about the constant hacking of their mailboxes or pages on social networks like VKontakte or Odnoklassniki, today they deal with such a problem less often. Not least, this is due to the password - the most important part of any account, which for some reason is often neglected. And in vain.
Illustrative Changes - Part 2
The most popular characters are exclamation and underscore. These days, long passwords are better and more secure.
Tax Code and other important data
These passwords are harder to guess; however, hackers will increasingly work to get this information, especially if they are part of the answer to a secret question about some of the online victim services.We have repeatedly spoken with you about how not to use the same password for several online services. Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem. Password managers no longer have to store codes and passwords; You will have a unique password, extremely complex and difficult to guess, for each service you subscribe to. Like your name or city name.
Imagine that you have a page in the social network or, for example, an account in Skype. If some attacker gets access to the same Skype, it can spend the money in your account. In this case, the company itself, you can not present anything, because they themselves are responsible for your account. Or another case - someone opened yours and started sending spam to your friends. Who can it be nice? No one, and only you will be guilty.
“It’s useless to create standards and opportunities for creation,” said Barr, “for convenience, people will continue to use access keys that a hacker has through specific software.” In computer science, this term refers to a set of words or alphanumeric strings provided by a user to access an operating system, program, or network. In practice, this is a much more complicated and long password than we use today.
The dilemma is always the same: will users refuse simple passwords for more secure access keys? In these times, we read in the foreign press, as well as nationally, robberies that support the perceived inefficiency of complex passwords consisting of alphanumeric characters and symbols.
But before we start talking about the main topic of our article today, I would like to make a small digression. I want to tell you that even an extremely complicated password consisting of 50 characters cannot protect you if you neglect simple security rules. Why?
- First reason: you save the password in the browser. Never, remember, never do it under any circumstances! There is a type of trojan that, when it hits the user's computer, checks the saved contents of the browser and, when finding the saved data, transmits the information to the attacker, without you even knowing about it! Therefore, all important data (the same password) always write in the diary or on a sheet of paper, access to which only you have.
- The second reason: it is a continuation of the first. If someone has acquired data from your account in a social network, then he will certainly try to apply this password to other resources, where you are also registered. That is why some users simply lose their mailboxes - they use only one password everywhere! So you can not do! For each site, create your own unique character combination!
- The third reason: phishing sites. Alas, not one of us is insured against them. Phishing site is a fake, the design of which completely copies some popular resource. Very often, for example, forges the same “VKontakte” - you go to its exact copy, which is not on the domain vk.com, but, say, on vkkkk.com. After you enter data from your profile, they instantly get to the attacker, although you yourself can not go to your page - because this is a completely different site, only externally similar to VC! Therefore, always carefully follow the domain names of sites where you enter a valuable username and password. (The phishing site can also be accessed by changing the hosts file, but this will be broken next time).
- Fourth reason: keyloggers. A keylogger is a small program that is usually launched without notifying the user, which remembers all his actions: each keystroke, mouse movement, etc. Mostly keyloggers are used by jealous people who want to catch their soul mate by writing a love letter to an unknown person, but often such programs get on the computer from the world wide web and are used by bad uncles to steal data, because everything typed on the keyboard is stored in a file, which is then sent to intruders.
You are not tired yet? I hope not, but modern reality is a very cruel thing and you have to be prepared for it. These are just a few of the main reasons why people lose access to their accounts. Therefore, follow the rules about which we wrote a little higher and then the risk of falling into such a situation will be reduced to a minimum.
The problem is that most users did not follow the recommendations of Berra and in fact did not understand most of the most important aspects. Such a password is also too short and can be found in just a minute of work. The tips that we published in the article “Creating a Secure Password: Password Today” are still absolutely relevant today.
Many users are not even aware of the value and importance of a complex, carefully chosen password. Not to mention the unreasonable habit of reusing the same password through several online services. A short password, albeit using letters, numbers and symbols, is not completely secure: but it was already known.
How to come up with a complex password?
Well, friends, now we come to the most interesting, namely, we will learn to create complex passwords. In fact, nothing new in the system, which will be discussed further, no, just many users do not even know about it.
Where to begin? Perhaps this is why - the minimum number of characters can not be less than 8. Why exactly 8? According to recent studies, words of 7 numbers or less are chosen much faster than of 8, not to mention something larger (for some reason, the difference in the selection over time is very large). Nevertheless, we advise you to slightly increase the number of numbers to at least 12-14 - in this case, it will be almost impossible to pick up the characters programmatically, it will take years!
This, of course, is not new Ferragostan. However, several security researchers have confirmed that a key phrase or a long phrase, possibly accompanied by some special character, is very effective. It is, in fact, easily remembered, has a good basic entropy value and cannot be derived from any brute force system.
The optimal password is easy to remember, but difficult to guess the others. Always avoid using, for example, vocabulary words, names, birthdays, common dates, and other obvious words or phrases, such as the name of the website for which the password is intended. A secure password contains at least 8 characters and includes numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters, and special characters.
So, now about the most important thing. Take some simple Russian word. Suppose the word is "wallet". Now we take and write it on the English layout, that is, we did it, evf; ybr. A wonderful set of characters, it should be noted. Now at the beginning or at the end we add one capital letter - V. It turns out V, evf; ybr. Quite good, but that's not all. In the final part, we add some arbitrary number, for example, the year of your birth - 1975. The final password is as follows: V, evf; ybr1975. It has 13 characters, including letters of different registers, numbers and special characters. Believe me, it will be so hard for an attacker to pick up this word that he most likely will not even be able to do it!
Do not use the same password for other sites.
Using mnemonic technology is another effective way to create complex, easy-to-remember passwords, just memorize a sentence and base your password on the first letter of each word. Avoid using the same password for all websites, applications, and online services that you use. If you cannot remember all the passwords, do not write them down!
Update your password often
This has already been officially proven: people simply cannot choose passwords. The most popular passwords in the world were easily recognizable. Last year, several major breakthroughs occurred in the security systems of several sites where millions of user passwords went online.
The password, which you can see a little higher, is given only for the purpose of familiarization and DO NOT NEED to use it! You can create it yourself by following our instructions. Just do not forget the password! Whatever happens, write down the set of characters with your diary or in some notebook and hide it away from human eyes. You do not need to record it in the phone - there someone can see it, and if the phone is also stolen, then ...
Both cases provide an ideal opportunity to analyze the habits of millions of consumers, and the conclusions from this are very unpleasant. Seventeen percent of the people whose accounts were shot used the easiest and easiest way to get a password.
Four of the 10 most common passwords have no more than 6 characters. This refers to the seven entries in the top 15 rankings. This is surprising in view of the fact that modern software and hardware for brute-force attacks can break similar passwords in seconds. Administrators of sites that allow such poor protection are either irresponsible or lazy, the Guardian said.
By the way, there are special programs for automatically generating and storing passwords on a computer, but I do not recommend using them - despite the fact that the data is securely hidden in the program, something can happen to the computer and then you can tell your data the word "Goodbye "... Be careful!
We continue the topic of security. We have already talked about, and methods to protect your page.
Obviously, they indicate that recommendations for good defensive practices simply do not reach enough people. The list of most frequently used passwords has not changed much over the past few years, which means that consumer education has its limitations, although more and more people are wary of risks, there will always be a significant minority who do not want to spend time or efforts to protect from hacker attacks.
Keyboard character sequences are also decoded in seconds. According to security expert Graeme Cluley, these codes are actually generated by bots that register infinitely many email accounts in public services and use them for spam or phishing attacks. “Email providers are clearly not making enough effort to prevent them from being used for spam,” said Keeper.
In any case, we will come to the conclusion that the security level of the account will largely depend on how complex the password you set for VC (see).
For some reason, many users are not very difficult, and use the simplest combinations. But such negligence can go sideways (see).
How to come up with a complex password VKontakte
Yes, in fact, like any other site. Use a few basic principles.
Using passwords is a rather awkward job. Fortunately, we can use password managers. These are programs or web services where you can store all your passwords in one place in a secure, encrypted database that is locked with one main password. Therefore, you need to remember only one password.
Regardless of which version you decide to use, you can store an unlimited amount of data to enter a password-protected environment, you can automatically fill in online forms and be able to use two-factor authentication. The advantages of the paid version are that the data is synchronized with various devices, store the password and can share folders with other people.
- Use letters and numbers
- Type the password in different keyboard layouts
- Do not store data on the computer
- Password length - at least 8 characters
What can be learned from this? You should not be limited to a standard password, in the spirit of:
Well at least the fact that many sites have introduced a rule to use the letters of the Latin alphabet, and at least one number or a special character. But in fact, it turns out not much better:
The program offers exceptional ease of use and the ability to store notes for future use. Mobile apps are free. According to Patrick Wardell, the problem is related to the possibility of using malicious code from an application to access the system.
This can occur, for example, by infecting a computer with a virus from an unsigned application. Today is a bit more specific in the technology industry, because it runs a search engine, without which many of us cannot find what they want on the Internet and organize their time. The company's long history began just 19 years ago from a small garage in Menlo Park, California. The most popular search engine today serves more than 5 billion users from 160 different countries who speak 123 different languages.
As you can guess, hack or pick up such a combination, for the attacker will not be difficult.
So what password can be called secure? Here is an example:
12! @Avi # @ $
Here numbers, letters in different layouts and special characters are used.
Video lesson: what password can be thought up for the VKontakte page
For each of them, their daily lives will not be the same if they do not have access to their favorite search engine. To celebrate their 19th birthday, they prepared a special surprise for consumers. As soon as they click on the doodle, they will be able to turn a special wheel to entertain 19 specially selected games in the browser. What is the best way to keep your mood happy all day. For maximum ease, there are two levels of difficulty. Of course, you can share the results with your friends on social networks.
Conclusion
What else do I want to tell you. Refrain from storing your passwords on the computer. Do not write them in a notebook, and keep it on your desktop. Chances of them being stolen.
In contact with
