The state of cybersecurity is as dangerous today as ever. Business should be taken extreme care as attacks are coming from nation states as well as other malicious actors. According to Barracuda, their threat detectors are detecting an average of 1 million zero-day malware detections per day. Zero-day malware is malware that has never been seen before by anti-virus and anti-malware detectors. This is just one security company’s data. Generative AI has made it easy for malicious actors to quickly create new strains of malware that bypass traditional anti-virus engines.
The world may need to eventually move to a zero-trust security model for business. Zero trust is a security policy that establishes what is allowed to run on a network and everything else is blocked. Organizations that have high security needs are already doing this. This trend is expected to continue to trickle down to more and more businesses as the cybersecurity landscape continues to worsen.
In the meantime, having strong and lengthy passwords are a great security measure that businesses can take. The National Institute for Standards in Technology recommends longer passwords or pass phrases. Password length is a deterrent to many password hacking algorithms. Below is a chart showing how long it takes an average password hacking program to hack a password based on length.
As you can see adding length and complexity greatly increase the chances of keeping your password safe from malicious actors. Pass phrases like “The Barn D00r is Open!” Is easy to remember, mixes in letters, numbers, upper and lower case and special characters to make a secure pass phase. Even if we removed the word “Barn”, according to the chart it would take a brute force attack trillions years to hack your password. That ought to do it.
Where do your common passwords rank on the chart above? If you are in the red or purple, consider moving to a pass phrase to better secure your critical data.
Would you like to discuss password managers or data security in more detail? Contact us at (888) 600-4560 or via email at info@coldencompany.com.