Information is a key to right decisions
The words like “information age”, “information technology”, “the one who has the information rules the world” have long since settled in our minds. Everyone knows that information is one of the most precious resources.
Does information itself have any value? No, it doesn’t. Information is crucial in decision making. This is important. Right decision is the key to success in any field. Possessing information is a competitive edge in present business world.
No wonder that protection of information is paid much attention. The most part of information is created and stored digitally (Microsoft Office documents, different databases, and financial data in Intuit Quicken etc). Thus software and hardware means of protecting information are the first to talk about.
Protection is the first priority
IT Security is a rapidly developing branch of Information Technology industry. Market abounds in software products designed to restrict access to information and avoid informational leak, for example, tools for access control and authentication, firewalls, backup systems, antivirus pack-ages and others.
But when speaking about the simplest measures of information protection, the password protec-tion turns out to be the most popular among users.
Data on sales and financial flows, client database, bookkeeping and management accounting, analytic reports and forecasts – all these information is needed to run a company successfully and to make strategic decisions, which influence its growth. Unprotected access to information of these kinds is impossible. This is the simple basis of security policy of a company.
Loss of access – daily matter
Obviously, the weak link of any informational system is a human. Password protection is sub-jected to the “flaw”.
In spite of numerous measures been taken to secure password protection, such as limiting mini-mal password length and complexity, auditing passwords, regular change of passwords, nothing can solve the most common problem – loss of password. It’s hard to find a man, who has worked with a PC, but has never faced this situation.
You may easily forget a password. Being a sensible man you haven’t written it down into your notebook, you’ve chosen to remember it with a help of association. You are sure about the birth year, but your favorite meal has changed and that’s that – you can’t remember it!
Or a sales manager has quitted the job without giving you a password for supply reports. You can’t contact him, counteragents threaten you with breaking a contract, if you won’t pay your bills at once, but you don’t have access to the data.
If employee’s quitting had its roots in financial fraud or working for a rival company, than you shouldn’t even count on his revealing a password. But you still need the access. As soon as possible.
Thus, the problem of password recovery to encrypted data is to be solved. The absurdity of a situation you found yourself in is that the safer a password, the lesser chances you have to break it. Strict password protection policy is hard to intrude. Here is the good news: in most cases the access can be restored.
A few words about passwords
Since the problem of password loss first occurred the day password protection was invented, software developers have considered a way of tackling it. As the result a number of password recovery technologies have been presented at the market these days.
Putting aside the issue of nowadays password recovery methods, let’s start with basic knowl-edge about passwords, password types and information, which may assist you in finding a pass-word.
English language passwords generally use following symbols: 26 lowercase letters (a…z), 26 up-percase letters (A…Z), 10 digits (0…9) and 33 specific characters (!@#$%^ etc), which makes 95 symbols for any combinations. Sometimes specific symbols are excluded from the group, which decreases the number of possible combinations. Moreover, password may be short or long, which is crucial when one cannot retrieve or reset a password, but has to use brute force attack.
Understanding human mind also counts on a quest for a password. In spite of numerous restric-tions forced on users to secure password protection, some users still neglect the most simple security tips. Such phenomenon proves that human is a weak link, a dangerous breach in system security.
