Despite the world’s best efforts to get everyone off passwords and onto something else for decades, passwords have pervasively persisted. Today, nearly everyone has multiple forms of MFA for different applications and websites AND many, many passwords.
Why in the world would anyone need a 20+ character password to protect against password hacking attacks?Password hash theft and crackingTheft of passwords is by far the most prolific type of password attack, usually by social engineering of some type, but it can also be due to malware and hacking tools.
One Internet-based company, Akamai, said they saw 61 billion password guessing attacks in just 18 months.Another popular password attack is password hash cracking. In most modern-day operating systems, any typed in password is transformed by a cryptographic hash algorithm into a representative hash of the password .
These are needed because one of the most popular support calls is a user forgetting or needing to reset their password. Password calls to tech support are so common that if they were all handled by a human, it would require significantly more resources and money than the involved organization has to spend. So, many/most organizations create or enable a self-help portal that the user can use to reset their password.
Source: Tech Daily Report (techdailyreport.net)