Stop using your child's name as your password!!! Let me explain.
A complex password is essential to keeping your account secure, making it harder for malicious actors to guess or brute-force your password. According to Explodingtopics.com, 31% of employees use their child's name as their password combined with some sort of easy numeric value like their birth year or something even more straightforward. Let me paint a picture for you. Stacy, who works in HR at your local Walmart, has a public Facebook account, and she posts, "Happy 10th birthday to my favorite son in the whole wide world, Daniel." Because everyone likes Stacy, she gets many likes, reposts, and comments, which is excellent, but only some people who see your posts mean you well. As an attacker who is looking to guess any of Stacy's passwords, I am willing to bet it starts with "Daniel" because she loves him so much for being her only child. Since her work requires a minimum of 6 alphabets, 3 digits, and 1 unique character, the attacker gets to work. Since we are in 2023 and Daniel just turned 10, it does not take a genius to figure out that he was born in 2013, so let the password-guessing begin. We will combine "Daniel" + his birth year "2013" and try each unique character above the numbers on the keyboard.
This would be something like "Daniel2013!", "Daniel2013@", "Daniel2013#", etc. But you get the point.
Your password does not have to be so weak!
I have developed a Python script that helps generate a password that does not only meet Stacy's work requirements but supersede them and, most importantly, cannot be EASILY guessed or brute-forced.
First, in our Scripting platform, we will import "random" and "string."
The "random" function allows us to generate characters from our library as an output, and the "string" function enables our password to access every alphabet, number, and unique character in our library.
Now, we move to the function of the script.
Line 4, we have our function called "give_me_password," and we set our password length to 13. In this case, you need at least 12 characters for your password to be considered vital.
Line 5 is where we concatenate (combine) our letter string + digit string + punctuation string (unique character) into one character that will be stored as "alphabet."
Line 6, we define our password by asking it to randomly generate 13 characters from our "alphabet" string that we have defined as letters, digits, and punctuation. The "random. choice" nature makes sure a random password is generated every single time we execute the script.
Line 7 just makes sure that the results are sent back to us.
Now, we round up our script and create a print statement.
Line 9, we set a variable, and the output will be "give_me_password."
Finally, Line 10 allows our script to pass the new variable as our password.
Together, the script should look something like this:
Now, we run the script, which should generate a random 13-digit character every time.
If you ask me, "YX4o,CR~JZEX?" is more challenging to guess or brute force than "Daniel2013#".
And every time you run the script, it generates a new password.
For example:
Thank you for reading.
