Why should I have a secure password?

You have certainly tried to register on some website and were bothered by having to choose a password full of requirements, with lowercase, uppercase letters, a special character, a number and at least 6 characters length. In this article we will understand and analyze the need for these requirements.

The fragility of a password

If you think about it, a large amount of important and sensitive information about your business and personal life is just a password away. A stranger, who for some reason, knows this word will have access to all the information described above. It may be protecting all your communication via email, files on your computer, access to a server and sensitive databases, among others.

You should think of a password as a key to your home. If the security of the lock is poor, it will be easier for a malicious person to invade your space. Similarly, a password considered weak will be a serious security breach in your business. It is considered an insecure password, a word that is easy to guess. For example the year of birth of the person, a surname, the name of the city where the company is located, among others. These are all words an attacker will try to use, so you should avoid them at all costs to protect your business from computer attacks.

Brute Force Attacks

In addition to experiencing obvious passwords, a malicious person attempting to penetrate your system may also perform what is called a brute force attack. This consists of trying all the character combinations possible. For example, he can start with the word "aaaaa", then test "aaaab", then "aaaac" and so on. It is precisely to combat this type of attacks that the password requirements with which we started this article arise. If it contains only lowercase letters then fewer combinations are possible. Simply adding a number already increases the number of possible character combinations exponentially. Also capital letters and special character increases the number of combinations.

With the password requirements described above you can make the number of possible combinations extraordinarily high to make it inpossible to attempt a brute force attack.

Conclusion

A password can be the only means of protecting valuable information for your business or personal life. Therefore, you should spare no effort to ensure that your password is secure. A secure password is a word that is not obvious to guess and is complex enough that a brute force attack is not feasible. For this you must use words with at least 6 characters and it should consist of uppercase, lowercase letters, numbers and special characters. This will make it virtually impossible for an attacker to guess your password. Remember that the security of computer systems begins with users and they are careless attitudes of users that are often the source of computer attacks with severe consequences.