Do you want to better protect your online accounts and the data they hold? Here’s a simple and immediate tip to create a secure password
It’s true, as Trilussa also teaches us, that statistics should always be taken with a grain of salt. Looking at the data regarding the most popular (and hacked) passwords worldwide, however, you can’t help but start to worry. Despite the awareness campaigns and the invitations to create secure passwords to protect their accounts (and the personal data contained within them), users show little imagination and attitude.
A report published and released by WP Engine and based on two databases of stolen credentials available online shows that among the 9 most used passwords there are “linear” numerical combinations (numbers in succession from 1 to 9 or from 1 to 6), the first six letters of the first line of the keyboard (“qwerty”) or, more simply “password”. The analysis of the database of the site I’ve been pwend returns a situation not too dissimilar: the podium is composed of the sequence of numbers from 1 to 9 and from 1 to 6, with the last step occupied by “qwerty”. In short, a rather worrying situation, which shows how easy it is for a hacker to steal a password and get into users’ accounts.
How passwords are stolen by hackers
Cyber criminals have two methods to get hold of your credentials: they try to break into the database of an online service and steal thousands (if not millions) of usernames and passwords in one go; they use social engineering techniques to find out your username and use special software to guess your account key.
This second method is used for targeted attacks and, although at first glance it may appear more expensive and complex, it allows you to steal a password in a matter of seconds. A normal home computer, in fact, has a very high computing power and, with ad hoc software, is able to process tens of thousands of words (or possible passwords) every second. In short, even the most seemingly complex password could be cracked in a matter of minutes by a novice cybercriminal.
How to create secure and easy-to-remember passwords
A trick to protect our accounts is to replace passwords with passphrases. That is, a set of meaningful words that are easy to remember and, at the same time, more complex for automated software to guess. This solution allows you not only to increase the level of security of your online data, but also to remember them more easily. If, for example, you need to create an access key for your business account, take your cue from three or four items that you usually have on your desk. And, if you want to make things more difficult, add numbers between words to increase the entropy of the password. In short, the secret to creating secure passwords is not through strings of random characters, but through a series of common words that can, however, complicate the life of hackers.