The University is now recommending that all passwords should be at least 16 characters long, and include special characters, uppercase and lowercase, and numbers. It is also vitally important that all of your passwords are completely unique.
Although this sounds like another way to make your life difficult, there is good reasoning behind it, and through the use of a password managers, it doesn’t have to be a pain to work with.
Why so long?
The reason behind the long, complicated passwords, is to protect against bruteforce attacks. This is when a hacker uses a computer to generate millions of different password possibilities, and test them against your login until they finally manage to find the correct password.
For a 12 character long password, it would take over a year for a best case scenario. So why isn’t that good enough? The problem is we don’t know what new technologies are out there, and it is important to future-proof passwords so that in a few years’ time, they won’t be compromised when some malicious group manages to create some sort of super computer which can crack a 12 character long password in seconds.
Why unique?
It is also extremely important to not reuse the same password on multiples sites. This is because sometimes companies suffer data breaches, and no matter how long and complicated your password is, it still gets in the hands of attackers. If you’ve re-used this “uncrackable” password on multiple sites, then that attacker can get into every single one of those accounts (unless of course, you have Multi-Factor Authentication enabled).
It’s also not enough to just change your super long complicated password by one character (e.g. changing the full-stop at the end to an exclamation mark) as once an attacker cracks one of your passwords, it’s very easy to run through all of the different possible combinations for that password.
This is why it is so important to use a completely different password on every site and for every account you create.
How to manage them
You may be thinking now that you’ve got 80 different accounts on lots of different websites and services, so how are you going to be able to remember 80 different long complicated passwords? The solution: a password manager.
Using a password manager means you only need to remember one long complicated password, so that you can store all the other 80 account login details in a secure database. Password managers also come with other really useful features, such as password generators, and browser extensions which allow you to auto-fill your account details on your website’s login page. To learn about which password managers we recommend, click here.
