Whether trying to figure out the best way to tackle your tasks or simply looking for a new context to help you prioritize what’s essential, combination lists are the answer. 

They’re Flexible

A combination is the selection of r things from a set without replacement, where order doesn’t matter—for example, picking a team captain, pitcher, and shortstop from a group of players. There’s an essential difference between a permutation and a combination, which you can read more about here.

The combination resume format is great for junior and mid-level professionals with valuable, transferable skills that can be applied to many jobs. It allows you to showcase these skills while presenting your professional history in reverse-chronological order.

They’re Time-Saving

Making all the possible combinations by hand can be difficult when your list has a lot of everyday items like names and numbers. Making a combo list is an easy fix that will save you time and effort.

Combinations are data selections where the order of the items doesn’t matter. For example, you could select a team of 3 people from a list of 5 members or choose any number of sides from a menu. Permutations, on the other hand, require selecting all possible orders of a group of items (such as digits or letters).

The solution to this problem is to use zip() to create a new list with all the combinations of the unique elements in both lists. This method is fast and has low space complexity since it only uses the distinct values from each list. It also avoids the need for a merge query, saving you even more time!

Combo lists can save you time by providing a menu of options when creating a new item. For example, if you create an item group named Sandwich and Milkshake Deal, you can add a combo that allows the user to select the type of sandwich or milkshake they want. It is helpful for restaurants that want to provide customers with more options without having to search through the individual items on their menus.

While defensive security measures like multi-factor authentication provide some protection against account takeover, combo lists make it easy for cybercriminals to target vulnerable users. The merging of usernames and passwords from several data breaches into a single list makes it simple for users to log into business systems or personal email accounts. It is why it’s essential to use clear and dark web monitoring that can identify leaked credentials.

The most effective way to protect against combo lists is to prevent using lookup fields as the RowSource for your combo. To do this, you must design your tables with relationship integrity. It involves using tables, not value lists, as the base for your lookups and a form as the RowSource for your combo. Then, the only safe way for your users to add or delete items from the combo’s value list is by submitting a form that manages the list.

Stay Organized

Using organizational tools to help you prioritize your tasks can be beneficial. However, it’s important to remember that everyone works differently and that what works for some may not.

Combo lists are a collection of compromised usernames and passwords assembled by threat actors from multiple data breaches or other security incidents, then sold on the dark web for cybercriminals to use to target your account. Learn how to prevent your information from falling prey to combo lists and other forms of identity theft.

A combo list is a special watchlist allowing you to combine multiple existing watchlists (system and personal) into one. This combined list can then be filtered with primary pre-scan conditions.

Stay Safe

With combo lists, crooks can perform account takeovers, targeted spear phishing attacks, impersonation, and even blackmail extortion. These tactics are effective because people reuse passwords across websites and services. Using stolen credentials, hackers can “prove” they gained system or network access and trick victims into paying a ransom.

Combo lists are text files that contain a list of leaked usernames and passwords in a specific format, obtained from different breaches and collectively stored within a file. This data can be fed into automatic brute-forcing tools that test multiple credentials on accounts or website logins until a match is found.

In addition, hackers can use combo lists to gain the PII (personally identifiable information) that bypasses multi-factor authentication, including security question answers, seed phrases, mobile phone numbers, and digital identity authenticator tokens. It helps them to get around the 2-factor authentication (2FA) requirements of a corporate account or service, like your online bank or work email account.

To avoid this, your employees should never reuse passwords and use password manager technology to generate unique passwords for each site or app they use. Additionally, it would be best if you encouraged them to enable 2FA when possible. In terms of protection at the enterprise level, you should consider using a dark web monitoring solution to detect when your organization’s employee credentials are compromised.