NDYNAMICS Blog

Passwords are important for any online account (and for most accounts in general). Sometimes they might feel like inconveniences, but it’s crucial to remember that these passwords are often the first line of defense, if not the only line of defense, that stands between your data and hackers. We’ll discuss ways that you can augment password security with other powerful measures.

One of the main ways to keep an account’s credentials secure is by changing them consistently. However, we ran across an article recently that plays “devil’s advocate” on the password security issue, and they made some fair points about how changing passwords too frequently can lead to decreased security as a whole.

Password security is quite the conundrum. We want our passwords to be easy to remember, but the problem is that passwords that are easy to remember are often simple and insecure. Therefore, it becomes a best practice to use complicated passwords with both upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols to compensate. The “passpoem” might resolve this issue in the most obvious way.

On Monday, June 15, LastPass officials warned that attackers have compromised servers that run the company's password management service and made off with some master passwords of users of the LastPass service. You can read more detail about the attack here:  http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/06/hack-of-cloud-based-lastpass-exposes-encrypted-master-passwords and here: https://blog.lastpass.com/2015/06/lastpass-security-notice.html/ There's lots of jargon in those article about algorithms, encryption, hashes, anomalies, multifactor authentication, vault contents, SHA's and GPU's.  Enough to make your head spin!  Here's the bottom line: the passwords you store on ...

Is the password an outdated type of security measure? This question seems to be getting asked around quite a bit, especially with more powerful threats loose all over the Internet. Unfortunately, the fault in passwords generally lies in the fact that humans generally don’t pick passwords that are secure enough. Thanks to a new method called “spaced repetition,” it seems there might be some hope left for the password after all.