Password Length vs Complexity: Why Longer Always Wins

Every site that you log into wants a capital letter, a number,

and a special

character.

But guess what? None of that matters as much as how long your password is.

Dr. Mike Saylor joins Prasanna and me to explain why.

Mike is a co-author on learning ransomware response and recovery, and he's got receipts, including 20 terabytes of pre-computed password hashes that you can just go buy.

which is the reason that nobody even bothers cracking passwords anymore.

They just look them up.

There's a hard

limit to how far these guys have gotten, and get past that limit and your risk goes way down, for now at least.

We also get into why some LastPass customers lost everything and others didn't, whether passphrases actually

work, and if forcing people to rotate their passwords does anything but annoy them.

If this is your first time watching or listening to me, I'm W. Curtis Preston, aka Mr.

Backup.

I've been obsessing about backup, recovery, and now

cyber recovery for over 30 years.

If that's your bag, I'm your guy.

You're not going to find anyone that cares about this topic more than me.

Ever since 1993, when I had to tell my boss that there were no backups of the database that we had just lost.

Now I've written five O'Reilly books, a blog, and this podcast.

Here we turn unappreciated admins into cyber recovery heroes.

This is the Backup Wrap-Up.