Story at a glance
- The World Economic Forum released a series of tips to help inform people how to change their passwords to maximize security.
- Using characters beyond just lowercase letters, adding in uppercase, symbols and numbers, can significantly increase a password’s security.
- A 12-character password that has one uppercase letter, one number and one symbol is considered unbreakable.
Coming up with new passwords can be annoying, albeit important, and the exact combination of the number of characters and symbols used could determine how fast a computer can crack a password.
The World Economic Forum released a flurry of insights that can help inform how people should change their passwords to maximize security. That can be incredibly important, as 91 percent of people know the risks of reusing passwords, but 66 percent do it anyway, according to password management company LastPass.
To assess how strong a password is, based on the number of lowercase uppercase letters, numbers and symbols, The World Economic Forum put together a handy “how safe is your password?” chart.
A standard eight-letter password contains 209 billion possible combinations, but a computer could calculate the right one in a matter of seconds. Adding even one uppercase letter to a standard password could increase a computer’s calculation to 22 minutes, an increase of more than 1000 percent.
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Using characters beyond just lowercase letters, adding in uppercase, symbols and numbers, can significantly increase a password’s security. The World Economic Forum said that using at least one uppercase letter and one number in an eight-character password would take a computer one hour to crack. Add in another symbol and now it’ll take a computer eight hours to crack.
A 12-character password that has one uppercase letter, one number and one symbol is considered unbreakable, with The World Economic Forum saying it would take a computer 34,000 years to crack it.
Creating strong passwords is critically important as digital security company Norton notes nearly 2 in 3 adults say they are spending more time online than ever before. However, the company also found that 83 percent of consumers want to do more to protect their privacy but 46 percent said they don’t know how.
Norton says a consumer’s best defense against social engineering attacks is securing accounts with strong passwords. The company also recommends using two-factor authentication, a process that requires a third-party program to verify a user’s identity in addition to entering the required password.
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