579 password attacks every second, how strong is yours?
Vasu Jakkal, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Security, Compliance, Identity, and Management, said Microsoft is currently seeing a whopping 579 password attacks every second, amounting to 18 billion every year.
Jakkal blamed the situation on today’s authentication conundrum where users struggle with remembering account passwords and typically chose to reuse the same password for multiple accounts or use simple passwords — which are easy to guess by attackers.
“One of our recent surveys found that 15% of people use their pets’ names for password inspiration,” Jakkal said.
“Other common answers included family names and important dates like birthdays. One in 10 people admitted reusing passwords across sites, and 40% say they’ve used a formula for their passwords, like Fall2021, which eventually becomes Winter2021 or Spring2022,” she added.
Microsoft findings aren’t unique, and several other similar studies have found that users, in general, are pretty bad at choosing passwords, with the most common password found in public data breaches being “123456” for each of the last six years.
This is why you need a strong password. Make passwords easy to remember but hard to guess
• Be at least 12 characters in length
• Must contain characters from at least two of the following four types of characters:
• English upper case (A Z)
• English lower case (a z)
• Numbers (0 9)
• Non alphanumeric special characters ($, !, %, ^, …)
• Must not contain the user’s name or part of the user’s name
• Must not contain easily accessible or guessable personal information about the user or user’s family, such as birthdays, children’s names, addresses, etc.
You must have a strong password, it is your first line of defense, think of it as a door lock, you would not have a lock on your front door that used an old skeleton key that all your neighbors could open with a paperclip!!!