Loose Parts by Dave Blazek for October 21, 2021

Cymbollically speaking.

Two cymbals, in fact. He keeps them under his desk in the lower case.

I’m keeping this one. The rules most companies put out for passwords are totally arbitrary and make it difficult to come up with good passwords.

To understand why you have to understand how a password system works: welcome to computer security 101.

There have been companies in the past that have been totally negligent in the way they store passwords. That is they stored them unencrypted. Responsible companies store them encrypted.

So you come up with a password, when you type it, the application encrypts it and compares it with the encrypted password on file. If they match, you get logged in. This is a one way process. You can’t de-encrypt a password.

So what hackers do is first they try all the “standard” passwords lazy people use. This isn’t low hanging fruit, It’s like picking it and loading it on the truck for them. Then they try various combinations of letters, numbers and symbols and encrypt them and compare them to your encrypted password.

There are approximately 75 different characters one can type on a keyboard. So if you use a single character the hacker has to take 75 different guesses. However for each character the complexity goes up by a factor of 75. The longer the password, the more difficult it is to hack considering the hacker doesn’t know what the length of the password is, so combinations of 6 , 7, 8, etc. all have to be tried. With each attempt the task takes 75 times longer. So hackers probably give up at between 5 and 10 characters.

Note that it doesn’t matter what these characters are: I_feel_fine is just as likely to be hacked as ^G_zqP&3g6aT. One of these is easier to remember.

So try things like 12/7/1941-PearlHarbor. This password should meet most $illy-@$$ password “rules.” except those that LIMIT you to 20 characters.

There are online password checkers. According to one of them, the password cited above should take 336 sextillion years to crack.

he thought this was easier than #ing on his keyboard…

Just what we needed…..more pings, clangs and bangs!

Sounds like it! Lol!

His old one expired: RockULikeaHurricane

Sorry. That password is all ready in use.

Logging on shouldn’t be a humdrum process.

Better than adding one of his digits.

Special symbols are no longer the barrier to password hacking they once were. Even the guy who invented the password, now says to use a longer, easy to remember passphrase. If you’re clever, you can come up with one you can type with one hand.

I don’t think those cymbals are allowed.

“My password keeps crashing.”