When it comes to choosing a password for a new account or service, we still make countless mistakes at the level of whether it is secure enough to prevent us from being hacked. By saying that “password” or “123456” are the most used passwords in the world, we should know that we are doing it really wrong and we put it on a tray for any hacker let it go with us
Having a sufficiently secure password is always something that you should do, since this way you avoid exposing yourself more than necessary to the dangers that a hacker may have with it and it can be used illegally later. However, even if we have this consensus about using strong passwords, where is the bottom line?
Check the strength of your password
In its most recent research on password security, Hive Systems found that any 8 character password can be cracked in less than an hour through brute force.
In addition, any password that contains less than seven characters can be decrypted instantly. These are just two important findings from an extensive investigation by the cybersecurity firm.
Taking these references into account, the minimum recommendation is a combination of 11 numbers and letters in upper and lower case. It would take three years to decrypt by brute force, but if you add a symbol on top of it, the result goes up to 34 years.
If you want the maximum strength for your password, you should try 18 characters in combination of numbers, uppercase, lowercase and symbols. This would not be cracked by brute force in less than 438 billion years with current technology and luckily no one lives that long.
Remembering such combinations can be almost impossible, hence the importance of using password managers, programs designed to be secure in which all user credentials protected under a master password are stored.
The most used passwords are very weak
Despite these recommendations, the reports on the most used passwords each year leave us in evidence. According to a recent list that NordPass has prepared so that users can get an idea of which are the most used around the world, 20 keys in particular are the ones that are used the most in all countries, not only in Spain.
To be more exact, these are the 20 passwords that we recommend not using:
Password
123456
123456789
guest
qwerty
12345678
111111
12345
col123456
123123
1234567
1234
1234567890
000000
555555
666666
123321
654321
7777777
123
These 20 passwords have really bad security, since the estimated time according to these security experts to crack the password is usually less than 1 second. The ones that take the longest to decrypt are ‘guest’ with 10 seconds and ‘col123456’ with 11 seconds, so you already know what to do to avoid being hacked in a matter of seconds.
