Thursdays Special: Creating Strong Passwords

This week we shall discuss about passwords. This is a very important issue and unfortunately, many people don’t give it the proper thought it really deserves. This password can be the last line of defense for your computer account, bank account or any other account that is important to you, for that matter. This is a prime reason for choosing a strong password, especially if it guards something important to you.

Do NOT use any of the following passwords:
names
birthdays
dates
Why is that ? Because they can be cracked very easily using dictionary attacks or even brute force.
Even a person who knows you a little can try to guess your password and if you use any of the above… you can guess what the possible outcome can be.

You can certainly use some kind of password generator that will create a very strong password, hard to crack but hard to remember and type. I don’t advise you to use them.

The basic thing to remember is that the longer your password is, the better. It will take longer to crack.

A strong password is composed of special characters and symbols: lower case (a, b), upper case (A, B), symbols (@, ^), numbers etc. Use a combination of these characters. For example, NeoMatrix91@zqp.com. As you can see, it has all the above elements AND it is easy to remember.

Another thing to know is that one password for all your accounts is not good. Make a different password for each of your accounts. Suppose someone hacks the password, the other accounts won’t be harmed. Of course, this is mostly true for important accounts like banking, credit card information etc. Forums and other non-important sites can share the same passwords. It all comes to personal prefference (or paranoia).

If you find it hard to remember the different passwords you came up with, write them down but store them somewhere safe and NOT in plain view on your desk.

In the end, it all comes down to convenience and this is the reason why many people don’t even use passwords. For the home PC or whatever. But what if you travel with a laptop carrying sensitive information ? Then you surely would want some kind of protection in case the laptop gets stolen.

Eventually, with enough processing power and time, any password can be cracked. This depends on the password, how long and hard it is. If the odds are right, it could take whole weeks of non stop processing to crack it and most likely, a curious person would give up in a couple of hours.

If someone would want to crack your password, there are two ways of using a password cracker:
a dictionary attack uses word lists, combined using different methods
a brute force attack uses all the possible combinations of characters and numbers until the password is found; although slow, they WILL be successful

When you decide on a password, use the Password Strength Meter to test it or try a password cracker to hack it and see how it goes.