Your Clever Password Tricks Aren't Protecting You From Today's Hackers
Security breaches happen so often nowadays, chances are you’re sick of hearing about them and all the ways you should beef up your accounts. Even if you feel you’ve heard it all already, today’s password-cracking tools are more advanced and cut through the clever password tricks many of us use. Here’s what has changed and what you should do about it.
Our passwords are much less secure than they were just a few years ago, thanks to faster hardware and new techniques used by password crackers. Ars Technica explains that inexpensive graphics processors enable password-cracking programs to try billions of password combinations in a second; what would have taken years to crack now may take only months or maybe days.
Making matters much worse is the fact that hackers know a lot more about our passwords than they used to. All the recent large-scale password leaks have helped hackers identify the patterns we use when creating passwords, so they can now use rules and algorithms to crack passwords more quickly than they could through simple common-word attacks.
