Guest Post by Techwarn
Do you take a cursory glance at your phone only for it to be unlocked as fast as possible, all thanks to the new facial unlock technology shipping with smartphones today? As a tech teacher who’s in touch with the most forefront development in the industry, you might think that password technology is heading out the door soon.
You might be
surprised to find out that passwords are actually still one of the most secure
options out there, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon, and that is just
one of the common myths.
Here are a few
more password
misconceptions that might shock you a bit. If it’s insightful,
bring them into the classroom with you. Although cybersecurity is not the most
interesting aspect of tech education, it’s extremely crucial nonetheless.
1 Passwords are not secure
When you consider
every other form of access that you could use to get into personal files,
passwords top the list here. Speaking of lists, we have considered all of your
government ID details, phone number, and biometrics, to mention but a few.
Your government ID
could be compromised and your phone numbers are not necessarily secrets. Biometrics
are great, but they can sometimes easily be fooled. It might only take a picture or a
face model to fool a face unlock system, or a lifted fingerprint
from something you touched.
Considering all
that, passwords are inherently more secure than the other forms of protection
out there. Combine a strong password with two-factor authentication and you
have a vault on your hands.
2 Passwords have a finite length
The funny thing
about this misconception is that they are fed to users by websites and apps
while attempting to promote proper password habits.
Take a look at any
five websites requiring logins right now, and you’ll see that almost all of them
(if not all) recommend setting a password of at least ‘8 characters.’ This can
quickly form an impression in your mind that eight (8) characters are all you
need for a strong password.
Before picking a password, always know that every extra
character you add reduces the chances of having such a password cracked by far.
Interestingly, the addition of every character makes your password harder to
guess exponentially, not linearly.
In layman terms,
all those extra characters count more than you know.
3 Length trumps complexity
Human ideas of
what a complex password is, do not always match reality.
What you believe
to be a very complex password could take a hacker mere minutes or hours to
crack.
While your mind
could make you believe you created such a complex password out of thin air,
chances are there was a rationale behind it. This could be a name, significant
year (your birth year, spouse’s birth year, etc.), common phrases (‘iloveyou,’
‘mypassword,’ etc.) or any other thing.
Hackers are not
what they used to be, though. With data from numerous data breaches over time,
they have been able to train their algorithms to predict such password models.
What they will have a hard time cracking is a very long password.
You should try to keep your passwords as close to 17 characters as possible, if not
more. For very sensitive data (say, a blockchain wallet), go all out and spend
as much as 23 characters on that account.
4 Passwords have to be specific characters
As long as the
website/ platform you are using the password for allows it, passwords can be
anything – anything at all. This means you don’t have to limit yourself to
numbers, alphabets and special characters alone.
As long as you can
type it out, you can literally throw anything into that password mix. This
gives you the freedom to mix up your passwords with emojis, some Greek or Latin
symbols, a script from another foreign language and much more.
5 Good users remember their passwords
The best users are
those who don’t even know what password they have for their different accounts.
This should be so, since they are running multiple passwords on all of their
accounts.
Likewise, the
passwords they are using are nothing close to being short – far from it.
So, how do they do
it?
Most of them use
password managers.
Wanting to
remember your passwords could set you up for a breach. On the one hand, that
thought makes you set a password which is easy to memorize – since you would
want to remember it yourself. It needs no telling that if it’s easy to remember
for you, it’s also easy for a hacker to find the pattern behind that password
and guess it.
On the other hand,
there is a huge chance you are repeating your passwords for multiple accounts
if you can remember them. This puts you at a bigger risk since a hacker can now
use password information from one account to get into the others.
6 Passwords are done
We had to put this
at the end for a reason. Now that you’ve learned more about passwords from the
above misconceptions, you should know that they are not going anywhere anytime
soon.
If they would be
taken off the sheet, there has to be something else in line to replace them. As
of the time of this writing, there is no such authentication and security
method which would kick passwords out of the way.
Before you mention
biometrics, you might want to recall that these biometrics are usually
supported on the password framework. More often than not, you are required to
set up a password first before you use biometrics of any kind.
Again, this tells
you just how important they are to data privacy and security. Anytime, any day.
This post was written by the wonderful people @Techwarn
Be sure to check them out!
This post was written by the wonderful people @Techwarn
Be sure to check them out!
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