Your Email Password Is Much Easier To Hack Than You Think

Over the past year or so we have seen a number of our clients have various types of problems with their email accounts.

A common reason we see these problems is that they get hacked. The most common reason they get hacked is that people insist on continuing to use extremely easy-to-hack passwords!

Your Email Password Is Much Easier To Hack Than You Think

Don’t take our word for it, read these two very good articles:

Why Your Passwords Are Easy To Hack

35% of Users Have Weak Passwords

There is in fact a whole industry that produces email password cracking solutions. This includes standard off-the-shelf hardware which can cycle through as many as 350,000,000,000 guesses per second. Still think your password would be hard to guess? Think again. This technology is flaunted, see this PowerPoint presentation, “We can use VCL for password cracking!” for an example.

Secure Your Password

If you follow our recommendations you will go from an estimated one day to hack your passwords (as they are today) to an estimated six months to hack them. So while there is probably no password that would be impossible to hack you can make it a lot more difficult. And it’s actually pretty easy to make it extremely difficult.

Change The Password On Your Email Account To A “Complex” Password

Make sure everyone in your company does the same.

What is a “complex” password”?

A Complex Password Will Have:

• no real words in it
• upper and lower case letters
• special characters
• numbers
• At least 12 characters long (the longer the better)
• Not the same as any other password you use

An example of what a secure password looks like is, scF2#L159n:w

Next problem, how to remember all these funky passwords?

Don’t even try, we recommend using a password manager and never allowing your browser to “remember your passwords”.

Recommended password managers

• Lastpass
• Roboform