DIGITAL

FEATURES
Simple Steps
to Protect
Your Business
from Hackers
You don’t have to be a security expert to see that cybercrime is on
the rise and that businesses are a prime target for hackers.
BY KEN COLBURN
The nature of cybercrime shifted years ago from
those that did it for kicks to highly sophisticated
organized crime groups.
The speed, convenience and anonymity of the
Internet allow them to operate in countries outside of
our reach and target U.S. businesses.
The reality is that everything is hackable, but are
you accidentally making it easier to become a victim?
Random acts of hacking occur every day because
unsuspecting victims made it too easy for these
sophisticated criminals.
You may recall in the distant past, thieves would
drive around affluent neighborhoods with various
garage door openers to see which homes could be
easily entered.
Garage door manufacturers produced newer
security measures in transmitters to combat this simple
“hack,” but if you didn’t update your equipment, you
continued to be an easy victim.
Today, if you don’t continually update your security
measures, the same thing happens.
PASSWORDS: FORGET EVERYTHING YOU’VE
EVER BEEN TOLD
Passwords are generally all that stand between
a motivated cybercriminal and your sensitive
information, but they are the bane of your online
existence.
Weak and default passwords are two of the most
common areas of exposure we come across when
working with most businesses.
At least eight characters long, upper and lowercase
letters, numbers and special characters is what
most of you have been taught.
Unfortunately, what the tech industry has taught
you is how to create difficult to remember passwords
that are easy for hackers to break.
With “brute force” computing power so readily
available to hackers these days, no matter what
combination of the 8 letters, numbers and special
characters that you’ve been trained to use, it’ll take
just over one minute to break it.
It doesn’t matter what combination you use,
because it’s a simple math problem that can be solved
quickly when your password is only eight characters
long (you can see for yourself with Gibson Research’s
Haystack tool: https://grc.com/haystack.htm).
Simply making passwords longer will exponentially
increase the security against this common exploit
known as a brute force attack (a sophisticated highspeed
guessing process).
All your passwords should be at least 15 characters
long. Once you’ve stopped gasping at the thought of
remembering multiple random strings of 15 characters,
here’s an example:
‘I Hate Passw0rds!’ is a 17-character password that
takes the brute force time from 1.12 minutes (for any
eight-character password) to 13.44 billion centuries.
Use pass-phrases instead of passwords:
Going 2 Aruba in 2016! (22 characters)
Married for 25 years! (21 characters)
14 FRANCHISING WORLD NOVEMBER 2015
(Continued on page 16)