Book Summary:
User passwords are the keys to the network kingdom, yet most users choose overly simplistic passwords (like password) that anyone could guess, while system administrators demand impossible to remember passwords littered with obscure characters and random numerals. Author Mark Burnett has accumulated and analyzed over 2,000,000 user passwords, and in this highly entertaining and informative book filled with dozens of illustrations reveals his findings and balances the rigid needs of security professionals against the ease of use desired by users. All of us remember when we first started with computers or the internet. We quickly learned that everything seems to need a password so to cope with that, we develop a password strategy. But statistics show that most password strategies aren't that great and are in fact so often predictable that crackers too often crack them in a matter of minutes. Some companies might assign you completely random character sequences but how many of those do you ever remember without writing them down? Some companies might force you to select complex patterns that include numbers and symbols, but a dictionary word followed by one or two numbers is the most common password pattern. Some companies force users to change their passwords so frequently that users end up with highly predictable patterns. But users aren't to blame, it's just that no one has taught them how to cope with strict password policies. This book will teach you how to cope with the world of password policies, password crackers, and human predictability. It teaches specific password patterns that will meet even the most unyielding security policy requirements but that users will remember in a snap. If you deal with passwords, you need this book. |