Britons are being urged to create passwords made up of short stories or random words linked together rather than the traditional characters and numbers, which will form a “near uncrackable” password according to a security expert.

When conducting computer forensics analysis and mobile phone analysis there have been traditional methods of bypassing security codes and passwords but there has still been the need to decode passwords.

Leading security expert Andi Hindle, director at Ping Identity, a firm which provides cloud identity security solutions, denied the existence of an uncrackable password but did claim there are some which will take “millions of hours” to decode.

He claims that using 4 random words with no apparent link such as Pink, Chesnutt, gin barley. Easy to remember if the user assigns a short story to them but they remain mathematically hard to crack! Some systems however will require numbers and special characters still.

It’s not just passwords being cracked though and Andi underlined that computer viruses that harvest passwords for phishing attacks are the most common ways for systems to become compromised.

As usual computer forensic experts can conduct computer forensic analysis after the event to try to pin point an attack and try to recoup some of the losses, this is no substitute for a solid data protection strategy among business and personal users alike.