After the Yahoo security breach: How to protect your data with unhackable passwords

Here are the best ways to safeguard your personal information

After the Yahoo security breach: How to protect your data with unhackable passwords

Here are the best ways to safeguard your personal information

On Wednesday, Yahoo announced its second known breach this year, revealing that more than one billion accounts were compromised in 2013. A majority of hacks go undetected for up to 280 days, so many people don’t know they’re at risk until it’s too late. While there’s no way to completely protect oneself from a cyber security threat, certain precautions can decrease the odds of hackers accessing vulnerable data. Gary Miliefsky, founding member of the Dept. of Homeland Security and the National Information Security Group, shared his tips for creating unbreakable passwords with us on Thursday. “Depending upon the environment, you should use a sentence all crunched together. For example, YourFirstandLastnameisTheBest is reasonably hackable using brute force and takes a long time, but it still gets an 80 percent at passwordmeter.com,” Miliefsky told Hearst Television on Thursday. He recommends using sites like passwordmeter.com to gauge the strength of potential passwords. “But, a password like YourName!15Th3B3st!$ is nearly impossible to hack. You’ll remember this because it’s a sentence, but you are using numbers instead of letters and symbols,” he explained. Strong passwords are crucial to keeping your personal data safe, since anti-virus software isn’t always reliable. “Anti-virus and firewalls are necessary evils but fail at least 50 percent of the time, maybe up to 70 percent,” Miliefsky said. Follow @theabigailelise on Twitter.

On Wednesday, its second known breach this year, revealing that more than one billion accounts were compromised in 2013. A majority of hacks go undetected for up to 280 days, so many people don’t know they’re at risk until it’s too late.

While there’s no way to completely protect oneself from a cyber security threat, certain precautions can decrease the odds of hackers accessing vulnerable data. of the Dept. of Homeland Security and the National Information Security Group, shared his tips for creating unbreakable passwords with us on Thursday.

“Depending upon the environment, you should use a sentence all crunched together. For example, YourFirstandLastnameisTheBest is reasonably hackable using brute force and takes a long time, but it still gets an 80 percent at passwordmeter.com,” Miliefsky told Hearst Television on Thursday.

He recommends using sites like to gauge the strength of potential passwords.

“But, a password like YourName!15Th3B3st!$ is nearly impossible to hack. You’ll remember this because it’s a sentence, but you are using numbers instead of letters and symbols,” he explained.

Strong passwords are crucial to keeping your personal data safe, since anti-virus software isn’t always reliable.

“Anti-virus and firewalls are necessary evils but fail at least 50 percent of the time, maybe up to 70 percent,” Miliefsky said.

on Twitter.

��vlog