How to create a secure password, according to science to protect us.

Every precaution is little to prevent us from stealing the account in the social networks, email, and other services and applications.

Published in Computerhoy.com by Sandra Arteaga

Main illustration TheDigitalWay in Pixabay

Every precaution is little to prevent us from stealing the account in the social networks, email, and other services and applications. Today, cyber attackers to steal the login data of the users are on the rise, so creating a secure password is of vital importance to avoid that the hackers can access to our profile.

But surely you have already heard different tips to create a password safe, many of them are not based on scientific criteria. for example, one of the most widespread means to create passwords complicated, that combine numbers, letters, punctuation marks and other symbols. however, at the time of the truth this kind of keys are difficult to remember, so that users end up the same codes

A few months ago, the national institute of standards and technology of usa (nist, for its acronym in English) released some new recommendations for creating strong passwords based on studies and practical cases, and now a study has been carried out by a team of researchers from different U.S. universities, provides us with other tips for creating secure passwords according to science.

These scientists have analyzed how the different approaches of cracking of passwords to better understand what is the method that follow the attackers to guess the key. criminals use computer programs that allow them to make millions or even billions of assumptions in a few hours, allowing them to finish to decode them.

The process can begin by trying with the word popular in the dictionary, then adding a number or a symbol, the first letter with uppercase letters, and so on. once you have been given the password, the attackers can try to enter it to access other accounts of the user, as many people re-use their credentials.

Taking this into account, when choosing a strong password, users have to focus not already in that is difficult to guess for a human, but that is difficult to understand for a machine. to achieve this, the researchers leave us with the following recommendations for creating a secure password:

• Use long keys that contain at least 12 characters, and mix two or three different types (lowercase letters, uppercase letters, digits and symbols) in places a little predictable (not the end or the beginning).
• Avoid including names of peoplepets, places you've lived, sports teams, birth dates or things you like. do not use either common phrases or song lyrics.
• Prevents common patterns, or easily decipherable (abc, 123, etc) or keyboard patterns (qwerty, 1qazxsw2, etc).
• A good way to create a secure password consists of composing a prayer that no one has said it before, and use the first or the second letter of each word as your password, by mixing it with other types of characters. So you'll be able to remember it easily and it will be very complicated to decipher for a machine.
• Don't re-use never the passwords