Open Sesame - Password Security

"Open Sesame!" is probably the most famous password in literature. It gave Ali Baba access to giant treasure. In the realm of expertise, computer passwords also give access to valuable treasures: precious business & personal knowledge.

Knowledge about your personal life, purchasing habits, credit quality & life style is valuable to those who can profit from it. For the Corporation, knowledge has even greater worth. It is not the "Bricks & Mortar" but the intangibles such as intellectual property, client lists, market strategies, pricing & compensation that account for over half the worth of the modern enterprise.

All of this personal & business knowledge most likely resides on a database somewhere & is obtainable with a password. In fact, passwords are the most common means of entry in any technique. They are also acknowledged as the most vulnerable points for security.

"Weak" or compromised passwords are the simplest way for hackers to gain entry in to a technique.

Simple or short passwords can be fundamentally discovered through "brute force" or "dictionary"

Assaults which concentrate intense computer power to crack a password. A letter password, for example, has only 676 combinations. A password with eight letters offers more safety with 208,000,000 combinations.

Ideally, a password ought to consist of 8 or more characters. They ought to also contain

A mix of upper & lower case letters, symbols & numbers. "A$d3B5i9X" would

Be an example. Microsoft security has encouraged the idea of the "Pass Phrase" as an alternative. A phrase such as,"TheLastGoodBookUBoughtCost$25!" has all of the needed elements & is also simple to keep in mind.

The human factor or social engineering contributes to password compromises. It is estimated that employees share their password eight times a year. Passwords may even be cajoled from untrained or naive workers. The standard rule is NEVER share a password.

Keep in mind the cliché of the "Six Degrees of Separation." You cannot know who will finally finish up along together with your password & own it.

To cope with these issues, plenty of leading edge firms are adopting a defense in depth strategy utilizing elements to better safeguard their knowledge

The layers of authentication consist of:

What you know...

A powerful password or pass phrase

What you have...

A Crypto-key, smart card or token

Who you are...

A biometric aspect such as fingerprint, hand, or retinal recognition

Usage of these defensive measures will increase dramatically in the future as people seek to thwart ever increasing threats to their private & personal knowledge.

Plenty of companies will be mandating them as a significant part of their security best-

Practices to safeguard a valuable asset: their treasured knowledge.