Only the provider will have access to the logs from which they can find out the source of the breech.
Passwords are easy to make rememberable and secure, but here are a few tips:
- Make sure the password is at least 9 characters long (rainbow tables are easy to fabricate up to 8 characters long and can be used to reverse lookup a hashed or encrypted password string, at 9 characters the combinations get more and more complicated)
- The best way of making a very secure password is the phrase method combined with a bit of transposing
1. Think of a phrase you know off by heart. eg The rain in spain falls mainly on the plain
2. Take every 2nd, 3rd or 4th letter. If there are fewer letters than your count then cycle the word until your count stops. eg 3rd letter of the phrase above is - eiialioea.
3. You can then do things like making it back to front, changing some letters for symbols (a = @, e = €, I = 1, etc) or capitals. As long as you follow a method you can remember.
4. By making every second character a symbol and then changing the remaining letters to alternating capitals "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain" becomes - e!I@l!o€A A very secure password that is difficult to hack, it would require a brute force attack which using current technology would take several thousand years to break.
- This does not mean you are not susceptible to shoulder surfing or keyloggers included in malware so you should also take precautions about those.
- The key advantage about this technique is a resistance to Social Engineering, which is the biggest growth area in current attacks. Even if they know or figure out you favourite phrase, by transposing and modifying it you make personal and difficult to guess further. You can also use a written phrase as long as you don't write down the rest of the logic you apply to it.
- All that said a password is useless if you cannot remember it so chose it wisely
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Topic: Online Mail Accounts (Read 1658 times)