A word on Passwords, choosing a strong password for whatever you may use it for.
What makes a good password?
Lets start by looking at the common methods of password cracking, this is what hackers will do to figure out your password.
I'm not going into a lot of detail here, just we'll just throw out the 2 most common methods.
Brute-force.
Brute-force is just what it sounds like, a program will try every combination of letters, numbers, and characters possible. No password is safe from this, brute-forcing will crack any password no matter what, lucky for us, this takes a lot of time. For passwords with only letters, there are 26 possibilities for each letter in the password, so for a 4 letter password, there are 456,976 possible combinations off letters. for 8 letter passwords, there are 208,827,064,576 possibilities! So choosing a long password is your best defense against brute-forcing. Usually 8 to 12 characters long, using numbers letters and symbols is your best bet.
Wordlist attack.
A wordlist attack is just what it sounds like. There are lists on the internet for sale, some for free, that contain thousands upon thousands of words, from many languages, containing common passwords, and the good lists have every word in the dictionary (and not just the english one) just for good measure. A program takes that list, and tries every word in it as your password. So obviously using any word in any dictionary for your password is out of the question. Even if you have numbers in it, some programs will try every word several times with a few numbers at the end. So many people use passwords that are common words, and they think they are secure because they put 2 or 3 numbers at the end. Please protect yourself and make good strong passwords!
Summary:
the best passwords to use have the following qualities:
8 to 12 characters long
include upper and lower case letters
include numbers, letters and at least one symbol ( ie ! @ # $ % etc)
do not end in letters ( ie money#man12 is bad, mo#neym12an is better)
are not in any dictionary
A good password is hard to remember sometimes, so write it down in a safe place until you memorize it, then destroy the hard copy.
The very best passwords are simply random, no one will ever guess them based on information they know about you.
example:
kdHk^83%kdGH.9lh
Now thats a great password!
×