Password Thieves: Yes, They Do Exist

When only a few keystrokes stand in the way of someone accessing your personal information, it is essential to have an unbreakable password. Hackers are willing to spend days, months, even years to crack passwords if they think accessing your information will be lucrative. And guess what, it is. You’ve read about it in the news – hackers have targeted huge companies like Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, Nissan, Zappos, Yahoo and more. You may have even been a victim of account hacking. It is a real and very scary thing. So, how do you protect yourself and your information?

Know Who You’re Up Against

First, you have to know the enemy. Hackers will typically use two different techniques to crack your passwords: a brute force or a dictionary attack. A brute force attack is when a program systematically searches every possible key until it lands on the right one. A dictionary attack uses a similar tactic but it only searches for likely possibilities from a predetermined list of words – like a dictionary. Let’s just say, if your password is your name, your kid's name, “password123,” “asdf1234” or something similar, you are a sitting duck.

Hackers are smart. They’re not going to try and hack your password on your bank’s website. They will first try and obtain your password through a less secure site and then hope you use the same password for your bank account. Never use the same password for your financial institution that you use for other websites. If you are afraid you’ll forget the passwords for every site you log into, a USB password manager is the perfect solution. A USB password manager is kind of like a portable safe for all of your passwords. You have to remember one password to access the drive where it keeps all of your other passwords secure. Remembering one fantastically hard password is much easier than remembering 20.

Create Multiple Secure Passwords

You must have different passwords for each account you sign into. As previously mentioned, hackers won’t try secure institutions first to gain your password. They’ll start with your login for ordering pizza online or your work email account and hope you use the same password for everything.

John P. of One Man's Blog wrote a stellar article, "How I'd Hack Your Weak Passwords,” in which he gives different methods to strengthen your passwords. Our favorite segment from his article explains:
“Pay particular attention to the difference between using only lowercase characters and using all possible characters (uppercase, lowercase, and special characters – like @#$%^&*). Adding just one capital letter and one asterisk would change the processing time for an 8 character password from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries.”

Many USB password managers have random password generators built into their software that can automatically create a super secure password for you. The best part is that you don’t have to remember it.

So You’ve Been Hacked. Now What?

The first thing to do is put your head down and clean up the mess. Change the password to the account that was hacked to something much more secure using the methods we’ve previously mentioned. But more importantly, change the passwords for every single website you log into. Make your passwords at least eight characters long with random numbers and other characters thrown in and save them on a USB password manager so you don’t forget them.