Currently, cyber criminals have found alternative ways to hack into personal or enterprise accounts so that they can accomplish their missions of accessing data stored. About 80% of the successful hacks resulted due to stolen or weak passwords. Thus, there is a need to improve the strength of passwords used by individuals or enterprises to reduce cases of hacking. As such, computer experts have come up with recommendations that can be used to ensure that new passwords are strong and reliable.

Firstly, long passphrases should be adopted to replace the usual passwords. According to researchers, passphrases containing up to 64 characters take hackers a period of 550 years to crack (Blanchard 11). This simply means that long passphrases comprising of special character substitutions cannot be easily hacked unlike the usual passwords consisting of letters and a symbol which can be cracked in only three days. Thus, the organization should decide to use long paraphrases. Secondly, the company should avoid frequent password changes. Unlike in the past where it was recommended that passwords should be changed after a recommended time, the National Institutes of Standards and Technology recommends that organizations should avoid changing passwords regularly (Shen 138). According to them, changing passwords periodically force people to repeat previous passwords or write them somewhere for remembrance. As a result, hackers get easier access to them. Thus, passwords should not be changed routinely unless there are potential threats.

Another recommendation is to create a blacklist from the most common passwords. As usual, hackers attack systems with the most obvious passwords including common words from the dictionary. To combat this, the company should create a list of all passwords they have ever used so that they can be comparing them with current passwords or those that they are about to form to avoid repeating them (Segreti 121). Also, creating a blacklist will enable employees to relate the passwords and create stronger ones. In this case, hackers will not find a loophole of weak passwords to try them on hacking.

More so, the company should apply password encryption which provides additional protection in case cyber criminals manage to access the password. In this regard, end-to-end encryption which is non-reversible can be used to protect the stored data as hackers will not be able to reverse the action even when they have obtained the password (Churi 23). Since networks are protected over the network, hackers cannot easily encrypt them. Furthermore, the company can ensure password safety establishing secure connections. Secure connections prevent foreign devices from connecting to the organizational network. For example, WI-FI networks belonging to the organization can be secured using WI-FI Protected Access (WPA) which provides stronger wireless encryption methods that the normal networks.

Lastly, the company should maintain continuous backups to avoid losing important information in case hackers access the system. Sometimes the aim of hackers is to ensure that they hack systems to distort vital information so that they distract the organizational progress (Anderson 48). Therefore it I important to backup information from time to time to avoid such incidences.

Having established the key recommendations to ensure that the organizational passwords are safe, a policy should be implemented to ensure that employees stick to the recommendations so that they work together to prevent cyber criminals from accessing the organizational enterprises.

Work Cited

Anderson, Wells H. “Protecting Yourself from Ransomware and Cyber-Attacks.” GPSolo 33 (2016): 48.

Blanchard, Nikola K., Clément Malaingre, and Ted Selker. “Improving security and usability of passphrases with guided word choice.” Proceedings of the 34th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference. ACM, 2018.

Churi, Prathamesh P., VaishaliGhate, and KrantiGhag. “Jumbling-Salting: An improvised approach for password encryption.” 2015 International Conference on Science and Technology (TICST). IEEE, 2015.

Segreti, Sean M., et al. “Diversify to survive: making passwords stronger with adaptive policies.” Thirteenth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security ({SOUPS} 2017). 2017.

Shen, Chao, et al. “User practice in password security: An empirical study of real-life passwords in the wild.” Computers & Security 61 (2016): 130-141.

 
Do you need high quality Custom Essay Writing Services?