People in Teesside urged to create stronger passwords to stop hackers
New research shows almost half use a pet's name or a significant date
We are hearing about a rise in hackers gaining access to devices and online accounts in Teesside due to weak passwords.
New research shows almost half of people use a significant date or a pet's name across the UK.
Mark Cronin, managing director of MSC IT Solutions in Hartlepool, said: "The amount of personal data not only in your email, in your shopping accounts or your banking details; the basic passwords that can be guessed easily, hacked or unencrypted easily by hackers leaves you susceptible to online fraud, impersonations and there's just so many people out there trying to make money, and are making money, from people with basic passwords.
"Some of the passwords we've come across or we've been told about when they've been hacked are things like their pet's names, their name, and 'password123' is a favourite. People think that adding numbers on the end like 123 or an exclamation mark makes passwords secure, but they're common and it's the first things people try for.
"This is a full time business for some hackers in some countries. They make a living off this business with ransomware and not only that, there's the increase in artifical intelligence and tools for cracking passwords. There's multiple charts online which shows how quickly a simple, eight character password can be cracked and it's within seconds.
"Over the last six months alone, we've had a large increase in phone calls from businesses and homes where people believe they've been hacked or they have been hacked simply because they've had a very, very basic password or things like they've had the password on a post-it note stuck to their monitor, written on their keyboard or even no password at all."
Research by the Institution of Engineering and Technology
New research by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) shows we are extremely predictable from a scammer’s perspective, with almost half using a significant date (21%) or a pet’s name (20%) as the topic of our passwords.
65% of people in the UK admit they are scared about being hacked in the future, with 84% thinking hackers are becoming more inventive. Yet only a fifth of people (20%) are able to correctly identify a secure password over a compromised one which can be cracked by a computer in less than a second, and 20% admit to having just one password for multiple websites and devices.
38% believing replacing letters with numbers e.g. p4$$w0rd is more secure when thinking about a password, with 45% believing it makes them harder to guess.
65% of people think passwords should never be written down, despite advice from cybersecurity experts, and 77% think changing passwords frequently makes them more secure, despite GCHQ recommending against this practice.
p4$$w0rd is in dictionaries of common passwords, so it can be cracked in less than a second. If you use the same password for every website and the password is breached from one site, all sites can be compromised without the attacker needing to try any other passwords - this is known as credential stuffing.
Top tips on boosting security
• Use randomly generated, long, unique passwords for each website.
• Enable Two-Factor Authentication where possible.
• Use a password manager to store your passwords for you and tell you when they have been in a data breach.
The threat is ever growing with 40% of 16-24-year-olds (Generation Z) and more than a third (37%) of 25-34-year-olds (Millennials) admitting to being impacted by cybercrime.
In fact, even those who haven’t been impacted are being targeted regularly, with a fifth (21%) of people receiving a scam email every day, 73% thinking hackers are becoming harder to detect and 41% admitting they wouldn’t know what to do if they’d been hacked.