On a recent episode of Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver managed to sit down with Edward Snowden to talk NSA and all things cyber security.
Snowden has gained infamy for leaking secret NSA documents that exposed the extent to which the American government is spying on the online activities of its own people. And while the main crux of the John Oliver interview focused on the many ways the NSA can access your nude photos, Snowden also spent some time dispensing some expert tips on password.
“For someone who has a very common, eight-character password, it can literally take less than a second for a computer to go through the possibilities and pull that password out,” said Snowden in the interview.
According to the former system administrator, the best way to protect your information is to shift from thinking about passwords to passPHRASES.
“Think about a common phrase that works for you. It’s too long to brute force and also make them unlikely to be in the dictionary.”
Snowden’s example? MargaretThatcheris110%SEXY.
We should note here that a recent Wired article actually points out that the sexy Thatcher password isn’t so secure after all. The article quotes Joseph Bonneau, a postdoctoral cryptography researcher at Stanford, as saying that “Snowden’s “MargaretThatcheris110%SEXY” is only a “borderline” secure password”.
However, the concept behind it still remains relatively secure, at least in comparison to some of the not-so-stellar passwords offered by Oliver in the interview, which included “passwerd,” “onetwothreefour,” and “limpbiscuit4eva.”
So say a unique passphrase is your best bet for securing your personal information. This ends up being quite a lot to remember.
And for large organizations like governments, passwords become a whole new beast. Many large enterprises choose not to leave password security to chance, and instead adopt a password management solution.
These systems and solutions help manage passwords and secure valuable organizational data by providing automated encrypted solutions and USB-based technology.
This is a big reason why password management has boomed to become a multi-million dollar market. In fact, the market revenue is expected to more than double to top $623 million by 2019, growing at a CAGR of 16.33%.
Password management systems can typically be categorized into two types—SSPR and privileged password management. The former is what you would get when you forget your email password, for example. SSPR technology helps users who have forgotten their password authenticate with an alternative solution and reset the password.
Privileged password management, on the other hand, is a type of password management used to secure passwords for login IDs by periodically changing each password to a new random value, storing the values, and protecting this stored information.
