In an age where our lives are increasingly integrated online, cybersecurity is more important than ever. Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting online information, systems, and networks from malicious parties. Whenever you access your email, check your online banking, or make a post on Facebook, you are relying on cybersecurity systems to keep your personal information safe. 

Requiring that users enter their password is a common security practice, but it is nowhere near hacker-proof. A common password-hacking strategy is the brute-force attack. This is when a hacker uses an automated program to guess random passwords until the right one is found. The dictionary attack is a similar hacking strategy, where guesses come from a list like the 10,000 Most Common Passwords.

The easiest way to prevent this kind of breach is to use strong passwords. First, to protect against dictionary attacks, never use a common password like “1234” or “password”. Second, to protect against brute-force attacks, consider how the length and characters used affect the guessability. Hackers often start by guessing short passwords using limited types of characters, so the longer and more special characters used, the better.

Using the Strong Password Exploration Maple Learn document, you can explore how susceptible your passwords may be to a brute-force attack. For example, a 6-character password using only lowercase letters and numbers could take as little as 2 seconds to hack.

Whereas an 8-character password using uppercase letters, lowercase letters, and 10 possible special characters could take more than 60 hours to crack.

These hacking times are only estimations, but they do provide insight into the relative strength of different passwords. To learn more about password possibilities, check out the Passwords Collection on Maple Learn

Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone in the MaplePrimes community. Valentine’s Day is a time to celebrate all things love and romance. To celebrate, we at Maplesoft wanted to share our hearts with you.

Today the heart shape represents love, affection, and a major organ. Though the heart’s full meaning today is unique to the modern era, the shape itself is much older.

 In ancient Greece, the Cyrenese people used the heart-shaped seed of a plant called silphium as a form of contraception. The seed became so widely used that it is featured on Cyrenese currency. This is the first case of the heart shape being connected to love and passion, but the form did not yet have an association with the human heart.

French poet Thibault de Blaison was the first to use a pear-shaped human heart to symbolize love in his thirteenth-century romance “Roman de la Poire”. Later, during the renaissance period, artists began to paint the Sacred Heart of Jesus in a spade-like shape. Depictions of the heart continued to develop and by the Victorian Era, the heart we know and love today had taken shape and started to appear on Valentine’s Day cards.

The simplicity and symmetry of the heart shape, which likely led to its widespread popularity, also makes the form convenient to define mathematically.

To find the equation for your heart, use the Valentine Hearts Maple Learn document. Choose one of four ways to define your heart, then move the sliders and change the color to make a unique equation for your heart. 

Once you’re done, take a screenshot and share it with your Valentine. Who says math isn’t romantic?