(Newswire.net — April 10, 2015) — Most people have 8 character passwords, or whatever the minimum requirement is. According to NSA leaker Edward Snowden, it takes less than a second for computer to crack that password.
The HBO show released a web video of the ‘Last Week Tonight’ in which the host John Oliver seeks advice from famous whistleblower Snowden on how to protect better our data. The interview with Snowden on security was cut from the show on Sunday, however, it has become available online.
Oliver went to Moscow to interview the former National Security Agency contractor. In a hotel near the KGB’s former headquarters, in a room with all the windows covered Oliver and Snowden discussed the NSA’s collection of Americans’ X-rated photos.
“The bad news is they are still collecting everyone’s information,” Snowden said,“ joked that include nude photos if any. However, when it comes to their privacy and security, the nude photos are not the
“Bad passwords are one of the easiest ways to compromise a system,” Snowden told Oliver. “For someone who has a very common, eight-character password, it can literally take less than a second for a computer to go through the possibilities and pull that password out.”
Joking that his password is worse than the shield security code on ‘Spaceballs’, Mel Brooks’ parody to Star Wars, has only five characters.
“That’s really bad,” Snowden said, adding that misspelling a word isn’t a good idea either, as permutations of common words are in the normal password dictionary, easy to access.
There are also a great number of those who think their passwords are rare. In fact, their way of thinking is common. For example, changing “1-2-3-4-5” to “onetwothreefourfive,” is actually easy to crack.
“The best advice here is to shift your thinking from passWORDs to passPHRASES,” Snowden recommended. “Think about a common phrase that works for you. It’s too long to brute force and also make them unlikely to be in the dictionary.”
“We need to think about encryption not as this sort of arcane, black art,” Snowden told the audience at the annual ‘South by Southwest’ Interactive conference in Austin Texas, last March. “It’s a basic protection,” he said.
But despite Snowden’s advice, Oliver said he’s not going to change his password to “admiralalonzoghost420YOLO” or any other insanely long passphrase.