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Passwords
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Passwords alone won't be enough to get onto America Online under a new, optional log-on service that makes AOL the first major US online business to offer customers a second layer of security. The so-called two-factor authentication scheme, being unveiled on Tuesday, will cost $1.95 a month in addition to a one-time $9.95 fee. It is initially targeted at small businesses, victims of identity theft and individuals who pay a lot of bills and conduct other financial transactions through their AOL accounts.
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Passwords are the most popular form of authentication and they are often the only barrier between a user and your personal information. The safest password technique is to create a new, strong password for each account.
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Passwords can be vulnerable to interception (ie, "snooping") while being transmitted to the authenticating machine or person. If the password is carried as electrical signals on unsecured physical wiring between the user access point and the central system controlling the password database, it is subject to snooping by wiretapping methods. If it is carried as packetitzed data over the Internet, anyone able to watch the packets containing the logon information can snoop with a very low probability of detection.
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Passwords to open are extremely hard to break in Office 2007. To recover the password, brute-force attack or dictionary search must be used. These programs have been developed in such a way that even the most optimized password breaker works very slowly. There is no easy solution and no success guarantee. Unless the password is very short or a constitutes a simple dictionary word, you have to spend a lot of computing resources to recover it.
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This actually made passwords more vulnerable because a brute-force attack could be performed on each half of the password at the same time. So passwords that were 9 characters long were broken into one 7-character hash and one 2-character hash. Obviously, cracking a 2-character hash did not take long, and the 7-character portion could usually be cracked within hours. Often, the smaller portion could actually be used to assist in the cracking of the longer portion. Because of this, many security professionals determined that optimal password lengths were 7 or 14 characters, corresponding to the two 7-character hashes.
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[A]s passwords get closer to random numbers and letters, they ... get harder to remember. That doesn't mean that you have to fall back on a weaker password, though. You can m15peLL w0Rdz intentionally, or use a mnemonic device like a strong passphrase. Be sure to read the Microsoft article below for some very useful advice on this subject.
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