You don't have to remember passwords!. This is an infographic on an alternate way to keep passwords and user IDs safe, no matter how long, no matter how many, and no matter how complex they are. Preamble to the reader: The following infographic and presentation of it is based on my own experience handling many passwords and user IDs. Be assured that I have used the techniques you are about to read without a single failure for many years, many accounts, and many computers. Don't be intimidated by the Anonymous graphics used in the poster: invasion of your privacy is in your hands.
Password safety is a matter of concern for every Internet user. Passwords are a kind of digital signature that make us different from every other user. To make things stronger and secure, passwords are accompanied with a user identification; the User ID.
We all strive to make strong and unique password and user Ids. But this has a drawback: the longest the password, the more difficult it becomes to remember. In addition to that it is highly recommended that:
We don't have any problem with the capital and lowercase letters, but the allowed special characters are another story. Generally speaking, the special characters are the following:
! # $ % & ' * + - / = ? ^ _ ` { | } ~
The special characters shown above are dispersed all over the keyboard, although most of them are in the top row.
Here are some examples of good an bad passwords:
There are possibly hundreds of news on Internet security breaches; we find them daily, each one with a particular story. However, one article my suffice to illustrate the big problem that easy passwords may represent. The following story appeared in Msn.com - Security: Breach shows even experts choose bad passwords: Easy-to-guess passwords such as '123456' are all too common. Here is the news in brief:
On Dec. 24, Anonymous announced it had hacked into the Austin, Texas, think tank Strategic Forecasting Inc. (Stratfor) and stolen thousands of private email addresses and credit-card details from the firm's clients and recipients of its emailed newsletters, which include Boeing, Bank of America, Chevron, AIG, Sony, HSBC, Wells Fargo, Google, the United Nations and all four branches of the U.S. military.
Five days later, Anonymous published the list of more than 859,311 email addresses, 860,160 hashed passwords, 68,063 credit cards and 50,569 phone numbers.
Stratfor clients used easy-to-guess passwords such as, "123456, "11111111," and "123123." Other terribly insecure passwords: "111222333444," "12345678901," "administration," "123456789abc," "12345stratfor," "hello123," "lawenforcement" and "intelligence."
Security experts recommend building long, complex, case-sensitive passwords with multiple characters. Stratfor clients clearly did not heed that advice; only 1,411 of the leaked Stratfor passwords had 11-character passwords. The number of passwords dropped off even more as the character length increased: There were 627 people with 12-character passwords, and only 165 had passwords with 13 characters.
Why is so difficult to make long strong passwords? The answer is: It's not difficult to make strong passwords, the problem is that people avoid using complex passwords because then they are forced to remember the complex password they devised; that's the problem!
So the task of constructing long, strong, unguessable passwords is a real need, but another collateral situation is always stalking in the darkest and unreachable regions of our minds:
The answer is a definite YES to all the questions.
For the PDF version of this infographic follow this link.
For the Image version of this infographic, follow this link.
