It is important to use a secure and unique password, especially now that there are a number of people who lose their personal information and fall victim to data breaches and password leaks. To avoid this, you can take the precaution of making sure you craft strong usernames and passwords for your online accounts.
Salih Ismail, Lecturer, School of IT & Engineering, Curtin University Dubai shares some pro hacks in protecting your password.
The following transcript is auto-generated from Youtube
I’m Salih Ismail I’m the program
coordinator for the school of IT and
engineering at Curtin University the by
how do you identify yourselves to a
machine there are three general broad
categories of doing this the first one
is something that you know off like
passwords pin codes etc the second
method is something that you have like
an RFID card a Visa card or a MasterCard
the third method is something that you
are for example biometrics fingerprints
face recognition retinal scans are good
examples of this the most important
aspect in protecting passwords online
the first step is to have a good length
of password recent statistics actually
show that if you have a password of 8
character lengths and it’s all lowercase
it’s gonna take for a normal machine
it’s gonna take about one day to
actually crack that password there is
about 226 to the power of 8 so that’s
about 208 billion different combinations
of password and it’s just gonna take a
day to actually crack that password and
with now imagine doubling the processing
power with two computers it’s just gonna
take half a day to actually crack the
password so the length of the password
and the complexity of the password is
the most important aspect of predicting
your password online recent research
actually shows that you need to have a
password length of at least 12
characters with a combination of
lowercase characters uppercase
characters numbers and symbols the
second point is an age-old saying do not
put all your eggs in the same basket so
do not have the same password for all
your various accounts so if an intruder
gets access to one of your password
basically
he has access to all of your online
accounts and this could be really risky
another important tip is to have
separate email accounts if possible for
all your social media accounts passwords
can be thought of as keys that gives you
access to a room from using a door but
sometimes there’s more than one way to
actually access the room sometimes
there’s a window and a thief could
actually make use of the window to
actually come into the room rather than
using the door similar to that in online
password protection ders are the
security mechanisms in place in case the
key gets lost something that’s very
common to all of us is the forgot your
password mechanism so sometimes in order
to reset your password the best option
and the most commonly used option is to
answer some security questions
the most important tip in answering a
security question is to lie about them
yes this is one thing that I ask my
students to be not honest about for
example if the question is who’s your
favorite football player please do not
answer them honestly like Cristiano
Cristiano Ronaldo earlier no Messi those
are public information that could be
gotten the intruder could get those
public information very easily from your
social media accounts the last step to
actually stay safe online and protect
your password is not to share them
people tend to often have a habit of
writing down their passwords because it
is actually very difficult to remember a
plethora of passwords for different
social media accounts and financial
accounts etc so each account is supposed
to have an individual separate password
now the question that kept that tends to
be asked a lot is how do you remember
all these passwords one of the best
options and suggestions that is provided
by security consultants and
professionals is to come up with your
own pattern of abbreviation for
passwords that you would tend to
remember make sure that you don’t write
them down
nor store them in a txt file in in your
computers please do not do that it is
similar to living the key of the door
under the mat it’s the same concept so
make sure that you don’t you don’t save
your passwords on the same computer
which you are required to use the same
password the lack of security awareness
is one of the most common reasons as to
why we are vulnerable please stay safe
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Salih Ismail is an industry experienced academician who is working as a Lecturer in the School of IT and Engineering. He is currently pursuing his doctoral research in the security of cloud computing. His research interests include Cyber Security, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing and Semantic Web. He graduated with a distinction in MSc Computer Systems Management from Heriot-Watt University. He received his BSc (hons) in Information Technology from the University of Bedfordshire. Prior to academia he worked in the industry in various posts like IT Manager, Technology Officer, Database Administrator, etc. and sat on the advisory board for tech startups. He has provided consultancy to various organizations around the globe as a Penetration Tester, Forensic Investigator, and Security Consultant. He has received various awards showcasing his Excellency in Cyber Security including the prestigious Dubai Electronic Cyber Security Innovation Award.
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