Government employees should not use their internal passwords for external services.
You should not use your IDIR password for anything other than logging on to your government account, i.e. do not use it for a Hotmail or Yahoo account, a PIN for a bank machine, your Amazon account, etc.
There is a possibility that unauthorized people could use your unsecured password to access secure accounts associated with you such as your IDIR account. By using different passwords for unsecured accounts and your secure IDIR account you close this security exposure. There are two ways that unsecured passwords could be exposed:
Employees are asked to create and manage lengthy and complex passwords. This is necessary because encryption algorithms are only as strong as the password used to encrypt and to open the file. Short length passwords (even complex passwords of 8 characters in length) are relatively easy to break as the attack technology for password guessing has dramatically improved recently. Large complex passwords may seem daunting, but they can be quite easy to create, and more importantly, easily remembered without the need to write them down. Although the method offered below will not create a password as strong as one using truly random characters, it will help you create and use lengthy and complex passwords when needed.
Step 1. Think about a phrase that you can easily remember (titles, famous quote or something that means something to you). For example:
Step 2. Take the first letter from each word, this is easy to do while you say it to yourself:
Step 3. Substitute capitals, numbers and symbols for some of the words:
From a simple sentence, you now have a 14 digit password that cannot be recognized by any dictionary attack and by adding symbols and numbers, it is nearly uncrackable (see chart below).
If the password cannot be guessed and is not found in a dictionary, the cracker has to try a brute-force attack. When brute-forcing, the time to crack the password depends on the amount of possible passwords that the cracker has to try. The amount of possible passwords increases with password length and with increasing diversity of characters being used (complexity).
Let’s take the scenario of a cracker trying 15 million passwords per second. This is currently the maximum speed being claimed by password cracker vendors. You need a pretty fast computer to achieve this. The following table shows the computed time to crack a password with 15 million tries per second.
Notice the incredible increase in time to try all possible combinations when password length and complexity increase
Length | All Numbers | All Lowercase | Combination of uppercase and lowercase | Combination of numbers, uppercase, and lowercase characters | Combination of numbers, uppercase, lowercase and special characters |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
4 | instantly | instantly | instantly | instantly | instantly |
5 | instantly | instantly | instantly | instantly | instantly |
6 | instantly | instantly | instantly | instantly | instantly |
7 | instantly | instantly | instantly | instantly | instantly |
8 | instantly | instantly | instantly | instantly | 1 second |
9 | instantly | instantly | 4 seconds | 21 seconds | 1 minute |
10 | instantly | instantly | 4 minutes | 22 minutes | 1 hour |
11 | instantly | 6 seconds | 3 hours | 22 hours | 4 days |
12 | instantly | 2 minutes | 7 days | 2 months | 8 months |
13 | instantly | 1 hour | 12 months | 10 years | 47 years |
14 | instantly | 1 day | 52 years | 608 years | 3000 years |
* Data taken from https://archerpoint.com/securing-your-accounts-with-strong-passwords-and-2fa/
What we see is that:
* any password shorter than 8 characters can be cracked instantly
* any password 10 characters or less can be cracked within an hour.
To be on the safe side, we recommend a minimum password length of at least 14 characters.
Note: the crack times mentioned in the table are needed to try all the possible passwords. There is a great chance that the cracker only needs 50% of this time. Also bear in mind that a cracker can always have a lucky shot at his first try and crack the password immediately. The chance is very small, but theoretically it is possible.
Wikipedia: