Honoring World Password Day

[leif erikson]

Recent events point to a need for greater account security. If you do not currently have a strong password, staff encourage forum members to consider changing their passwords and making it stronger by including upper/lower case, several numbers and special characters with the password length at least 10 characters long.

The site also allows you to use two factor authentication. This can be set up in your account details under the Password and Security tab. You may send codes to an email address or to an app on your cell phone. We do not require two factor authentication but do recommend it. All staff are required to use strong passwords and two factor authentication.

 

[leif erikson]

World Password Day

 

[Noble Zarkon]

This is quite frightening!

 

[Broken_Erika]

I'm certain that my password was randomly generated by this site like 10-15 years ago, otherwise it would be something stupid. It's got Uppercase, lowercase and a number

 

[WildWeazel]

This is quite frightening!

View attachment 730659

If my math is right, "correct horse battery staple" is still holding strong at 1 octillion years.

But that's only half the story, because it's only considering brute force attacks which are useful against random passwords. Beyond ~8 characters the real threat is dictionary attacks with known passwords that have been reused. In that arena "correct horse battery staple" is a terrible password because everyone knows it and it will be in the first billion or so guesses.

So it's not good enough to have a complex password. It needs to be totally unique, and coupled with two factor authentication and good security sense. The best way to ensure unique passwords is to use a password manager to generate a new one for each account, and/or use a mnemonic to come up with something nonsensical for any that you will need to manually enter.

That is, until we can all switch to passkeys...