Saturday, April 18, 2009

Securing Your Computing Environment With Strict Passwords

A strong password really helps in securing your computing environment. In modern computerized working environment, you need to choose different passwords at different places or devices to implement system and network security. The password restricts unauthorized access to the system, network and specific devices secured with a password.

However, it will be a surprising fact for people with less IT knowledge (or just working knowledge of computing) that common passwords are only for novice people. Hackers and IT experts with sound knowledge of network security can break normal passwords within minutes. Even best firewalls and security hardware cannot protect you from brilliant and destructive mind of sophisticated cybercriminals.

Well the question arises, do we have any solution to keep our home of office systems, networks and devices secure from any such intrusion? The answer is YES. But, that is not possible through any software or hardware, because any security software or hardware is secure only for some time. Hackers and sniffers find out the way to break this security implementation very soon. The only solution is choosing a strong password for you. Well, choosing a strong password that is tough to guess, break or crack is not too tough, but tricky.

You need to follow some very old rules and guidelines for selection of a perfect password. Normally, people choose a convenient password for them that is easy to remember for them but tough to guess to others. A common password selected by a normal people can be the name of his/her spouse, kids or the place where they live; sometime people choose their date of birth or anniversary as password; some smart people make a combination of both. However, all these strategies are unsecure for you.

Always remember, that hackers don't only rely on guessing a password. They believe in using several strong password-cracking programs to crack your password. These smart and destructive programs can try to match all words of a dictionary as your password within minutes. So you will end up losing your password if it’s a word found in dictionary. So it's better to keep your smartness aside and follow these simple guidelines:
1. Never use a word from dictionary as your password,
2. Don't think that a word or phrase with multiple characters is an ideal password,
3. Use a strong combination of alphabets, numbers and special characters as your password,
4. Keep your password secret, never share password with anyone,
5. It's better to choose a passphrase as your password, and at last
6. Keep changing your password periodically.

Following the above guidelines can save you from password theft and provide you a secure working environment.

By: Dan Stratton

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