Do you know about these posters for occupational safety? Wash your hands here, wear a helmet, don't smoke there? Do you notice these? Exactly!
The well-intentioned advices to not only change passwords at certain intervals, but also to create challenging ones, go unheard and unheeded. We often hear: “Too inconvenient, too difficult!” The willingness is given, but the password is weak. The date of birth of the partner, that of the firstborn or just their name — when it comes to password security, the level doesn't even reach the end of the runway.
Unfortunately we know from experience that password insecurity exists at all levels: Regardless of whether it is a private email account, the online shop, social media or the dating community, very few users devote their energy to protect their access code. The problem: If an unauthorised person has access, he usually has all or at least many doors that he can open without permission.
There are many tips and tricks for generating passwords that are also secure. We at movetech even have a free tool that can be printed out (more about this here). A calculation shows why it makes sense to choose long and complex passwords: Equipped with special software, a computer generates around 2 billion keys (or passwords) per second. If a password consists of seven lowercase letters, 8,031,810,176 combinations are possible — a good 8 billion. The software therefore needs less than five seconds to generate all combinations. With a bit of luck (or programming errors) and perhaps a little more time, the software can also try out all the passwords.
The more special characters, upper and lower case letters and digits a password contains, the more difficult it is to be cracked. And behind some cryptic sequences like Tko3sin2-Zt stands a simple logic that helps you to create a veritable password. How? Tko3sin2-Zt doesn’t make any sense? Of course, if you know that the song line from the Steve Miller band classic “Fly like an Eagle” is hidden in it. It says “Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin’ into the future”: T, k and o are the first letters of the first three words, then 3 times s for slippin', in2 means into, and the hyphen - also shows the direction of the future. And that’s the doozy: This is also possible with Pink Floyd's “Learn to Fly” published in 1987 (L2f #Ployd87) or with “Fluegzeuge im Bauch” from Herbert Grönemeyer (fZiB! -Oemy). Even from “Such a nice day” by Tim Toupet - that's the one with “and I fly, fly, fly like a tiger” - can be created passwords.
Have fun puzzling!
6ord0n K1rs731n
STe22en Mau3R
