«123456», «123456789», «azerty» are among the most used passwords in France. This shows that many Internet users neglect this essential link in the cybersecurity chain which protects them from hacking. However, they can be understood, and it can be tedious to compose a password that is sufficiently complex for many services.
Emojis to make life easier?
Emojis Researchers from the Kaspersky company, however, offer a surprising new method: creating passwords by adding emojis. Why? This makes the task of hackers extremely complex. The cybersecurity company explains:
When intruders try to crack a password containing letters, numbers, and punctuation, there are less than a hundred variations of each symbol that they must choose. But there are more than 3,600 standardized emojis in Unicode.
She continues: “Adding one to your password forces hackers to sift through approximately 3,700 variations per symbol. So, in terms of complexity, a password made up of five different emoticons is equivalent to a classic password of nine characters.”
This technique has many advantages, and notably the fact that emojis are easier to remember than a very complex sequence of letters and numbers. Likewise, cybercriminals do not include emojis in their brute force attacks where they examine many password combinations.
Unfortunately, this method also has drawbacks. For example, some services simply do not allow you to create passwords with emojis, such as Outlook and Gmail.
Therefore, Kaspersky offers a compromise which consists of adding a or two emojis to your password on applications that allow it in order to make your password more complex.
Remember that while entering emojis is relatively simple on a smartphone, it is not not the same on computer. On Windows, you need to press Win key + period simultaneously to open the emoji table in any input field. As for macOS, the emoji table is available in any application under Edit → Emoji and Symbols.
Finally, and if you want to make your life easier, you can opt for an emoji manager. Passwords. We have put together two guides for you to the best free and paid services.
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