Hackers are Taking Advantage of Technology Improvements

Keeping your network and data safe is extremely important. We advocate to our clients that they should come up with complex and unique passwords for each of their accounts. Account hackers have improved their methods, so in order to ensure that you aren't a victim of information theft or worse, diligence in the creation of your passwords is essential.

To give you an idea about why creating complex passwords is important, consider how a hacker works. They aren't just sitting in solitude drinking Mountain Dew and entering potential password combinations one at a time. They have developed advanced methods to get the information they are seeking.

Hackers utilize programs designed to use several password combinations at once. Using this software, hackers can attempt as many different passwords as their computer's processor allows. In some cases this is thousands of separate password combinations. Because of increased processing power now available, these password-cracking programs can now run exponentially faster, checking substantially more password combinations than the same software could handle just a short time ago.

By using a single graphics processor like a high performance AMD Radeon HD7970, along with an advanced password-cracking algorithm, a hacker can try 8.2 billion password combinations per second. This is one user with one computer. The more resources a diligent hacker has available, the more likely it is that they will find the correct combination. In fact, take a PC and equip it with two or more GPUs, at just a few hundred dollars apiece, and the hacking speeds will increase by up to three times.

Hackers are now taking advantage of social networking tools and have formed their own online hacking communities. Using forums, hackers pool their resources and vast hacking knowledge. One resource hackers like to share are lists of passwords successfully stolen from data breaches. By sharing these lists, hackers gain an insight into what are the actual passwords that people use and then adjust their algorithms accordingly.

The more organized that hackers become, and the more they network and collaborate, the greater risks organizations face. With hackers, there are power in numbers; it has been estimated that it only takes a few hackers working together to crack a list of 100,000 accounts with nominal-average security in only a couple of hours.

The technological and networking advancements that hackers have utilized, presents a dubious situation for businesses and individuals alike. Fortunately for users that have created complex passwords, hackers primarily target accounts with weak security. Implementing solid strategies to protect your network's security, and coupling it with the latest and greatest security solutions available, users can stay one step ahead of hackers looking to infiltrate your secure information.

As far as hackers have come over the past decade, we at Computerware have also grown in our capabilities with our security solutions. We offer comprehensive security solutions such as our Unified Threat Management (UTM) tool that covers all of your network security bases. Even if you engage a UTM solution, you will still want to educate yourself and your employees on solid practices like how to make a complicated password that will ward off hackers. To learn more about UTM, the best practices in password creation, and network and account security, give us a call at (703) 821-8200.