|
||
Protecting your Password: Create an Unbreakable One on World Password Day
| ||
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Every year, on the first Thursday in May, World Password Day is commemorated, a perfect setting in which Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ: CHKP), a leading global specialist cybersecurity provider, takes the opportunity to send a reminder about the importance of dedicating special care to passwords, as they are one of the main barriers against cyber criminals.
Ram Narayanan, Country Manager at Check Point Software Technologies, Middle East
Passwords are used by billions of users around the world, but despite their enormous importance, there is still a high number of bad practices when it comes to managing and creating them. In 2019, the UK's National Cyber Security Centre revealed that 23 million people worldwide continue to use insecure passwords such as "123456", evidencing that many users are still unaware of the potential dangers.
But this is not the only problem we face. Relentless technological advances are not only benefiting users, but also providing cybercriminals with new tools to carry out their attacks. What once were considered secure passwords are now becoming outdated, creating new vulnerabilities.
The advent of new graphics cards with virtual memory (VRAM) has opened the door for these hardware devices to process high-speed data, the same way it is used in cryptocurrency mining. However, they can also be used in brute-force cyberattacks to obtain passwords, being the newest models able to perform more than a million checks in just one second, way faster than the previously achieved by central processing units (CPU). This means that if we have a password with less than 12 characters based exclusively on the use of letters and numbers, it could be breached in just a few days.
According to the latest report from Hive Systems, which shared the approximate times in which cybercriminals could "crack" our passwords, range from minimal effort and almost instantaneous times for the most insecure passwords, to 438 trillion years for the most robust keys. In a matter of just one year, these same figures have seen their possible vulnerability times cut by up to 90% that, with the entry of new agents such as cloud services or artificial intelligence, could be even more reduced in the coming years.
The goal and the reasons are clear, but what does a password need in order to be secure and strong? Check Point Software gives the definitive keys to achieving it:
“Every day, cybercriminals create new attacks aimed at stealing user passwords. Techniques such as phishing have managed to breach thousands of services by stealing credentials, especially here in the UAE, where on average, organisations are attacked 1345 times per week in the last 6 months compared to 1207 attacks per organization globally,” shares Ram Narayanan, Country Manager at Check Point Software Technologies, Middle East. “This risk can be easily remedied by establishing secure passwords, making it much more difficult for cybercriminals to guess these combinations, ensuring the highest level of security for our devices."
Follow Check Point via Twitter: www.twitter.com/checkpointsw Facebook: www.facebook.com/checkpointsoftware Blog: blog.checkpoint.com YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/CPGlobal LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/check-point-software-technologies
About Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (www.checkpoint.com) is a leading provider of cyber security solutions to corporate enterprises and governments globally. Check Point Infinity´s portfolio of solutions protects enterprises and public organisations from 5th generation cyber-attacks with an industry leading catch rate of malware, ransomware and other threats. Infinity comprises four core pillars delivering uncompromised security and generation V threat prevention across enterprise environments: Check Point Harmony, for remote users; Check Point CloudGuard, to automatically secure clouds; and Check Point Quantum, to protect network perimeters and datacenters, all controlled by the industry’s most comprehensive, intuitive unified security management; Check Point Horizon, a prevention-first security operations suite. Check Point protects over 100,000 organizations of all sizes. |
||
|
||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||