Week 7 Posting - Best Practices for Account Management

 All around the world there are individuals that have technology with passwords, the idea is not foreign to most people and is a mild inconvenience for the appearance of security, however poor cyber hygiene and reused passwords are a easy target for bad actors. Anytime a account is setup you may see the requirements: “Upper and lower case, special characters, and a minimum length”, all of these provide more complexity that’s goal is to prevent an account takeover. By simply changing from numbers only to adding lowercase letter and at 10 characters it adds the complexity of cracking the password from almost instant to about an hour. Add uppercase letters and it goes from one hour to one month, add symbols and it takes 5 years. It is incredible how adding a single additional key can make all the difference, this is done by what are called brute force attacks. Brute force attacks rely on trying every possible combination by starting to the lowest and working the way up, for an example the first code may be 0000 then 0001, followed by 0002 & 0003 and so on an so fourth until the code is found. Even though this type of password requirements seem strangely it provides better account access management to the company and ultimately the end user. As a system administrator can also enforce more strict requirements or require a password be changed every quarter to keep passwords new and harder to break by bad actors.

 

References

Fripp, C. (2021, March 22). Use this chart to see how long it'll take hackers to crack your passwords. Komando.com. https://www.komando.com/security-privacy/check-your-password-strength/783192/