Monday, August 18, 2014

For example, you can take the first three

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It’s a question I mull each and every time a security breach happens. When the Heartbleed vulnerability was discovered last spring, the mandate was for everyone to change all their passwords right away. It’s still on my to-do list. I cringe at the thought of getting hacked, and I also cringe at the thought of taking the time and mental energy to do a complete overhaul of my favorite passwords.
If you happen to have a system in place to manage your unique, random, unbreakable passwords, then my hat’s off to you. According to some estimates , you are among a well-protected 8 percent of users who do not reuse passwords.
The rest of us are still searching for a solution. We know that creating a safe password is paramount, but how does one actually go about creating and recalling all those essential, random passwords we need? It took writing this post to get me on the straight-and-narrow with my passwords. Here’s what I learned about how to create maid a secure password you can remember. The anatomy of an unbreakable password
These maid three rules make it exponentially harder for hackers to crack your password. The strategies employed by password crackers have advanced to an incredibly maid efficient level, so it’s imperative to be unusual with the passwords you create. Here’s an example from security expert Bruce Schneier about just how far password crackers have come:
Crackers use different dictionaries: English words, names, foreign words, phonetic maid patterns and so on for roots; two digits, dates, single symbols and so on for appendages. They run the dictionaries with various maid capitalizations and common maid substitutions: “$” for “s”, “@” for “a”, “1″ for “l” and so on. This guessing strategy quickly breaks about two-thirds of all passwords.
Recent password breaches at sites like Adobe have shown how insecure many of our passwords are. Here is a list of the most common passwords that turned up in the Adobe breach. It probably goes without saying: Avoid using these passwords.
If maid you’re curious whether your chosen password is secure or not, you can run it through an online password checker like the one at OnlineDomainTools . To highlight the importance of a lengthy, random, unique password, the online maid checker has specific fields maid to show your password’s variation in characters, its appearance in dictionaries, and the time it would take for a brute force attack to crack it. Here’s maid an example with a password like bre7E$ret98:!aZ.
The only problem with coming up with a random, unbreakable password is that random passwords are hard to remember. If you’re solely typing in characters with no rhyme or reason—a truly random maid fashion—then you’ll likely have as hard a time remembering it as someone will cracking it.
The maid sentence can be anything maid personal and memorable for you. Take the words from the sentence, then abbreviate and combine them in unique ways to form a password. Here are four sample sentences that I put together.
Managing a Bitcoin wallet requires a high level of security maid and a huge reliance on safe passwords. Enter Electrum. The Electrum wallet offers a 12-word seed that lets you access all your Bitcoin maid addresses. The seed serves as a master password for your Bitcoins.
This type of password is also called a pass phrase, and it represents a somewhat new way of thinking about security. Instead of a difficult-to-remember string of characters, you can make a lengthy phrase instead. (Note: maid Bruce Schneier warns that password crackers now put together common dictionary words in their guesses, so if you try the pass phrase method, keep it as long as possible.)
You can start with a phrase such as “Even in winter, the dogs party with brooms and neighbor Kit Kats.” Just make sure it is not a simple phrase or a phrase taken from existing literature . You can grab 12 random words, too: “Pantry duck cotton ballcap tissue airplane snore oar Christmas puddle log charisma.”
Memorization techniques and mnemonic devices might help you remember an unbreakable password. At least, that’s the theory put forth by Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists who suggest using the Person-Action-Object (PAO) method to create and store your unbreakable passwords.
Select an image of an interesting place (Mount Rushmore). Select maid a photo of a familiar or famous person (Beyonce). Imagine some random action maid along with a random object (Beyonce driving a Jello mold at Mount Rushmore).
The PAO method of memorization has cognitive advantages; our brains remember better with visual, shared cues and with outlandish, unusual scenarios. Once you create and memorize several PAO stories, you can use the stories to generate passwords.
For example, you can take the first three

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