Password authentication is the most common authentication method and in theory can be very successful at protecting yourself and your company against cyber threats Passwords are simply a secret combination of words and numbers usually known only to an individual to validate his identity They are commonly required to be accompanied with a username for further identity validation However according to a recent report 81 of data breaches were exploited through weak and or stolen passwords Verizon 2017 This unveils the underlying issue the password authentication can have Many users are using passwords that are too short and or predictable A 2016 study involving a team analysing over 10 million passwords on the web discovered that 17 of users had 123456 for their password Furthermore they published a list of most common passwords most of which were either too short or had far too predictable patterns such as qwerty Guccione 2018 Hostile forces are therefore given the opportunity to exploit the fact that most businesses are vulnerable to a cyber attack and businesses cannot simply hope they are not targeted by hostile elements by staying beneath the radar since most hackers are opportunistic and can exploit your vulnerability at any time For a business to simply implement a password authentication system is clearly not enough but countermeasures and restrictions are easily available to force users into creating stronger passwords Hackers use a variety of different tools and methods to crack passwords which are as follows
