Defend against Password Cracking

The key line of defense is preventing your password from being cracked by hackers. The users and organization can use the following two ways to minimize the password cracking risk:

Password policies

The front line of defense is password policies. Password policies describe the set of rules to improve the security of a user's password by compelling or motivating users to create strong or safe passwords. The events of the password lifecycle like expiration, periods reset, and authentications are governed by password policies. Some policies of passwords provide advisory and best practices for the user. Some sites are using programming rules so that the users adhere to the policy. If the site has complicated criteria to create a password, and users are required to spend time, user frustration will arise. If you provide a password policy, which has guidelines and certainty for the user, it will help mitigate the frustration level of users. The examples of password policy are as follows:

Longer password: To substantially improve your password or security, you should create a longer password and passphrases. However, if the password regularly appears in the cracking dictionary, you should avoid that type of password and avoid the longer passwords that have been compromised previously.

Personal details: The password policy tells the user to not use any personal details or not use any link related to personal details while creating the password. Most users use their personal details while creating a password like pets, hobbies, DOB, account number, etc. A hacker will create the password combination using the personal details if they have access to see your personal information by social media. The password entered by the users should be checked to make sure that they don't include any basic information as login information or the name of the user.

Use different passwords: The different accounts should have different passwords. The password policies require users to enter different passwords for different accounts. It would be best if you did not use the same passwords for all your online accounts. The user should have distinct passwords, either working in the same department or using the same equipment.

Adopt passphrases: You should use passphrases like a standard. Policies of password require to create passphrases by the users as opposed to a password. The purpose of passphrases is the same. They have a large length; that's why it is harder to crack the passphrases. Numbers, letters and symbols should be included in an effective passphrase. It is easy for users to remember passphrases as compare to passwords.

Discourage sharing: The password should not be shared, and it is meant to be personal should be specified by the password policies. The adoption of 2FA (two-factor authentication) is another password policy. In the 2FA, a user should present two pieces of evidence: a password and a temporary code sent to the email or cellphone or other methods before login into the account.

Password screening

If you screen a dictionary attack against compromised passwords and a dictionary password list, it will become the best way to prevent dictionary attacks. Compromised password screens are used to collect the compromised data from a dark web source and the internet, and then it will determine the password which is trying to create by the user has been compromised. The tools of password screening work by checking the username's partial hash, password at login, setup of password, and reset. E-commerce companies and consumer sites use password screening to detect and prevent users from hackers who use previously compromised credentials.