Open Sesame – Password Security

“Sesame, open!” is probably the most famous password in literature. This gave Ali Baba access to huge treasures. In technology, computer passwords also provide access to valuable treasures – valuable business and personal data.

Information about your personal life, shopping habits, credit quality and lifestyle is invaluable to those who can benefit from it. Information is even more valuable to society. These are not “bricks and mortar” but intangible assets such as intellectual property, client lists, market strategies, prices and compensation, which account for more than half of the company’s value.

All of this personal and business data is probably somewhere in the database and is available with a password. In fact, passwords are the most common way to access any system. They are also considered to be the most vulnerable from a security point of view.
“Weak” or hacked passwords are the easiest way for hackers to gain access to the system.

Simple or short passwords can be easily found with “brute force” or “dictionary.”
attacks that concentrate powerful computing power to crack your password. For example, a two-letter password has only 676 combinations. The eight-letter password provides greater security with 208,000,000 combinations.

Ideally, the password should consist of 8 or more characters. They must also contain
a combination of capital and lowercase letters, symbols and numbers. “A$d3B5i9X” will be
be an example. Microsoft’s security encourages the concept of “password” as an alternative. The phrase “TheLastGoodBookUBoughtCost $25!” has all the necessary elements and is also easy to remember.

Human factor or social engineering contributes to password compromising. It is estimated that employees report their password eight times a year. Passwords can also be mastered by untrained or naive employees. The default rule is NEVER to report a password.
Consider the cliche of “six degrees of separation.” You can’t tell who will eventually get your password and become its owner.

To deal with these challenges, many leading companies adopt a deep protection strategy that uses three elements to better protect their information.

The three levels of authentication consist of:
What do you know …

A strong password or code phrase
What do you have…

Cryptographic key, smart card or token
Who are you…

Biometric aspect, such as fingerprint recognition, hand or retina.

The use of all three of these remedies will increase dramatically in the future as people seek to prevent the growing threat to their private and personal information.
Many companies consider them an important part of their best security.
methods of protecting an extremely valuable asset: their valuable data.