When creating accounts, users are often told to choose “strong” passwords—meaning that they are of sufficient length (often longer than 6 characters) and include a combination of characters that do not resemble simple words. The premise, of course, is that these passwords will be difficult for a hacker to guess. We’ve all seen the crucial scene in a movie where the evil hacker logs onto a victim’s computer and, using only their wit, guesses the correct password. But like most events in movies, this hardly ever happens in real life.
In today’s Internet age, hackers don’t need to blindly guess at users’ passwords because it is much easier to steal them. Take phishing attacks, for example. An April 2010 study by Symantec found that 17% of all spam messages are phishing attempts, wherein the user is lured into visiting a decoy site which imitates a site they would normally trust—like eBay, Paypal, or their bank. The unwitting user attempts to log in to the decoy site by providing their credentials and voila, they’ve just handed their password over to the hackers.
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