Set a Strong Password on Your Phone

My girlfriend and I had to take our cat to the emergency vet last night so I didn’t have an opportunity to prepare much material for today. However, I will leave you with a security tip. You should set a strong password on your phone:

How long is your iPhone PIN? If you still use one that’s only made by six numbers (or worse, four!), you may want to change that.

Cops all over the United States are racing to buy a new and relatively cheap technology called GrayKey to unlock iPhones. GrayShift, the company that develops it, promises to crack any iPhone, regardless of the passcode that’s on it. GrayKey is able to unlock some iPhones in two hours, or three days for phones with six digit passcodes, according to an anonymous source who provided security firm Malwarebytes with pictures of the cracking device and some information about how it works.

The article goes on to explain that you should use a password with lowercase and upper case letters, numbers, and symbols. Frankly, I think such advice is antiquated and prefer the advice given in this XKCD comic. You can create more bits of entropy if you have a longer password that is easier to remember. Instead of having something like “Sup3r53cretP@5sw0rd” you could have “garish-bethel-perry-best-finale.” The second is easier to remember and is actually longer. Moreover, you can increase your security by tacking on additional words. If you want a randomly generated password, you can use a Diceware program such as this one (which I used to generate the latter of the two passwords.