Recently
the Yahoo’s security breach took the news by storm. The incident compelled its
millions of users to question it’s reliability & this brings us to our
topic of what, as an end user, should we do to fortify our online accounts.
Here
we will discuss what makes our online accounts vulnerable & how we can
ensure utmost security of them.
What most of us do:
While
setting passwords for social media or email accounts, to meet the required
criteria, we use both lower as well as upper case letters in combination with
digits. But what most of us don’t notice is, simply capitalizing the first
letter or adding numbers at the end doesn’t make it hard to crack. Rather
adding birth dates or ages makes it an easy guess.
Recent
studies by Nicolas Christin et al. of Carnegie Mellon University found that
majority of the users used passwords like ‘Newspaper123’,
which being an usual practice leaves passphrase vulnerable.
Also
many believed that words that are harder to spell are harder for the attackers
to guess, being unaware of the mostly automated attacks. When a password
database is compromised attackers don’t type user guesses; they use word lists.
So keeping
these in view, setting up the safest password seems kind of a holy grail for
all of us. However, if we use some simple tricks, we actually can create an
invulnerable password for our account, keeping it easy to remember.
Use of rhyming poems:
Researchers
at University of California have found that using poems as passphrases makes
it next to impossible to crack. And such passwords are easy to memorize as
well. In fact these are unusual combination of words. You can use passwords
similar to these :-
•
A
losing party paralyzed
•
Elisa
Anthrax stabilized
•
A
Kurdish scarring televised
•
Providers
closely supervised
Being
poetic to set up a password may sound a little odd, but according to a
University of Southern California scholar Kevin Knight, it would take around 5
million years at current speeds, to crack such a poetic password.
Again
if you find it difficult to create a password poem for yourself, then you can
get it done through these links below.
The
same researchers, Marja & Kevin Knight have made a system that can create
such a passphrase for you & once it is sent to your email, the same
passphrase is immediately deleted from their server.
Capitalization & Symbols:
Studies show that using unusual
capitalization & uncommon symbols to randomize the password for security
can be greatly effective. You can use small yet unbreakable passwords with this
technique. Some of the examples you can refer to are:
“7AXEliot<”
“12BSBreak\”
Two Factor Authentication:
This
method has proven to be very reliable & robust for any kind of
circumstances. Heather Kelly of CNN writes, adding a second line of
authentication like OTP sent as text message or generated by an app can greatly
secure your accounts online.
After
the breach, Yahoo has been encouraging people to use its innovative two step
authenticating tool, Yahoo Account Key,
to even set aside the need to remember a password.
So
we would recommend you to go for this feature where available.
Along
with these techniques, we would also encourage you not to reuse a password
ever, for utmost security.
Conclusion:
Even
if these steps sound like going one step further for securing your accounts, we
would very likely suggest these. So that the next time you get a news on
extensive data breach, you won’t repent for not doing it.
Do
let us know about any other ideas you have, to create passwords that are strong
and easy to remember, by commenting below. Do share it with your friends.
