why is a strong password policy so important course hero

by Ramiro Hagenes 5 min read

If a hacker cracks your passwords, they could gain access to your social media accounts, bank accounts, emails and other sensitive accounts that hold your confidential, personal data. If someone obtains access to this information, you could become the victim of identity theft. Therefore, creating a strong password is vital.

Full Answer

Why is it important to have a strong password policy?

Website logins, email accounts, social media accounts, banking accounts, smartphone pass codes, ATM pin numbers, and home security system alarm codes all require some type of password. Creating a strong password policy is key to helping users safeguard these critical systems they rely on every day.

What is an example of a password policy?

A strong password will comply with these rules, meeting complexity, storage, and reset requirements. For example, many default password policies require a minimum length of eight characters and some combination of special characters. Why is password policy important?

Is a strong password policy enough to secure your Certificate Management?

A strong password policy doesn’t need to be the only line of defense to your systems and network. Adding multi-factor authentication creates multiple layers of security to protect users and resources. At DigiCert, we strongly recommend that users enable multi-factor authentication in order to secure their certificate management account.

What are the characteristics of a strong password?

The SANS institute recommends that strong password policy include the following characteristics: Contain a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, punctuation, numbers, and symbols. Contain at least 15 characters. Be unique from other accounts owned by the user.

Why is it important to have a strong password policy?

Creating a strong password policy is key to helping users safeguard these critical systems they rely on every day. While additional complexity can seem like an inconvenience to many users, it shouldn’t prevent a strong password policy from implemented in your organization.

How many characters are in a password?

Contain at least 15 characters. Be unique from other accounts owned by the user.

Why is multifactor authentication important?

Adding multi-factor authentication creates multiple layers of security to protect users and resources.

Can you include dictionary words in passwords?

Never include dictionary words. Never include patterns of characters. Go even further in your password policy by encouraging the use of pass phrases, which use phrases along with the strong password guidelines to add even further difficulty to passwords being compromised.

Can you change your password with one site?

While administrators quickly respond and notify users by forcing password changes, their efforts are limited to their own site. Changing a password with one site is not always enough. Chances are that compromised passwords are used elsewhere, leaving users vulnerable to hackers.

Why is it important to have a good password policy?

Even in a situation like that, it is still important to have a good password policy in place because a hacker can use (and often does) use a compromised account as a stepping stone toward taking control of other systems.

Why is password security important?

The first reason why password security is important is because the users do have rights to something. Think about it for a minute. The users wouldn't even have accounts if they didn't need access to something. Whatever resource the users have access to, it needs to be protected.

Is security important in a security policy?

Security is important, but it's easy to overlook the little things--like having effective passwords. The need for an effective password policy is so obvious, that I have to admit that I almost feel strange even writing an article on the subject. In fact, I could easily sum up the need for an effective password policy in a single sentence.

Why is it important to change your password policy?

It is key that your password policy prevents users from reusing old passwords. Some users may try to work around this by changing a single character to create a “new” password. It is important users are discouraged from doing this, as this makes passwords easier to guess in the event of a breach.

Why do you need a different password for each IT system?

Require users to use a different password for each IT system. This means every password should be unique across databases, VPN, and logons. Similar to the second best practice above, this helps ensure a breach of an unrelated company or service does not compromise security across all of your accounts.

How many characters are required for password policies?

For example, many default password policies require a minimum length of eight characters and some combination of special characters.

Why is a strong password important?

The strong password is the important aspect of enterprise security and enforcing stringent policy rules for password should be the standard of every organization in the world. Password no longer attributes to an MD5/SHA1/SHA256 value stored in a database but it’s more than that. It is very important for an organization to understand ...

How important is password length?

Length of the password is one of the important attributes. From a brute force approach the longer the length of the password the more time it will take to determine it. It is very important from organization perspective to enforce the minimum length of the password. This will ensure all employees within the organization are forced to set a password which is larger in length. As per the NIST Guide to Enterprise Password Management if we increase the length of the password from 4 to 12, given a character set of 26 characters the number of permutation and combination increased to 200 billion times.

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