What Actually Makes a Password Strong

Passwords are still the front door to most of your business data, and a weak one undoes a lot of other protection. The trouble is that people make passwords convenient for themselves, which usually means convenient for attackers too. Here is what actually makes a password strong, and how to build ones you can live with.

How passwords actually get broken

Attackers take two routes. They trick a person into handing the password over, through a fake login page or a convincing email, or they let software do the work, guessing and cracking at enormous speed or testing passwords leaked from other breaches. A good password has to hold up against both, which means it cannot be something a person would guess or a machine would crunch in seconds.

Length beats complexity

The old advice to cram in symbols and swap letters for numbers matters far less than sheer length. Current guidance from NIST, the federal standards body, favors longer passwords over forced complexity, and the easiest way to get length is a passphrase, several unrelated words strung together. Four random words is both much harder for a machine to crack and much easier for a person to remember than a short tangle of symbols. Longer and memorable beats short and cryptic.

Never reuse one

The biggest mistake is using the same password in more than one place. When one site gets breached, attackers immediately try those credentials everywhere else, and reuse turns a single leak into a master key to your whole life. Every important account needs its own unique password, no exceptions.

You are not meant to memorize them all

Nobody can remember a unique strong passphrase for fifty accounts, and you should not try. A password manager generates and stores them, so you remember one strong master passphrase and it handles the rest. That is the realistic way to follow all the advice above without living on sticky notes.

Strong passwords are simple to get right once you know the rules, and they are still one of the cheapest defenses you have. We set this up, manager and all, as part of how we secure our own operation and our clients'.

Book a call if you want help getting your team off weak and reused passwords for good.