Following the news of a cyber-attack on the website of ABTA, the travel trade body, David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab commented below.
David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab:
- Make every password at least 15 characters long – but the longer the better.
- Don’t make them easily guessable. There’s a good chance that personal details such as your date of birth, place of birth, partner’s name, etc. can be found online – maybe even on your Facebook wall.
- Don’t use real words. They are open to ‘dictionary attacks’, where someone uses a program to quickly try a huge list of possible words until they find one that matches your password.
- Combine letters (including uppercase letters), numbers and symbols.
- Don’t ‘recycle’ them, e.g. ‘david1’, ‘david2’, ‘david3’, etc.
- If you don’t feel able to remember lots of unique passwords, use a password manager to help you store and remember your passwords securely
Recent statistics
- Almost one in five (18 per cent) have faced an account hacking attempt but few have effective and cyber-savvy password security in place.
- Only a third (30 per cent) of people who go online create new passwords for different accounts
- One-in-10 people use the same password for all their online accounts. Should one password be leaked, these people run the risk of having every account hacked and exploited.
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