The UK’s national cybersecurity agency published a post advising the adoption of three-word passwords. These keys would be safer and easier to remember than passwords chosen by users to meet the complexity imposed by the sites.
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« Your password must contain at least one special character. »The injunction of sites that require you to create Passwords including upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols is believed to improve account security. According to National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in the UK, the effect would actually be quite the opposite.
The agency advises instead to choose a sequence of three random words, which would make the passwords much longer and difficult to predict, while being easy to remember. The problem with complex passwords imposed by sites is that it is impossible to remember a different series of random characters for each account. Most people use similar strategies, such as taking a common word and replacing the letter “O” with a zero, and the “i” with an exclamation point.
NCSC recommends the use of a password manager
These are all strategies that hackers include in the algorithms they use to try to guess passwords starting with the most common combinations. The three-word technique is not foolproof and is not as secure as passwords made up of a random sequence of characters created with a generator. However, the agency advises a variety of techniques, which makes the job of hackers much more complex because they have to use a different algorithm for each type of password.
Ultimately, the best solution remains the password managers. Those software, still relatively little adopted, make it possible to generate and store completely random keys in a secure manner without having to memorize them.
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