To crack or not to crack… Well… That’s up to you…
Passwords play a major role in securing your online accounts and this role is often underestimated and overlooked. Passwords provide the first line of defense against unauthorized access to these accounts. Weak passwords provide hackers with easy access to your online accounts, while strong passwords are considerably harder to crack, even with the password cracking software that is available in today’s world. Password cracking tools are always improving, and the computers that are used to crack passwords are getting more powerful every day.
Password cracking software uses one of three approaches to do its job: dictionary attacks, intelligent guessing, and brute force automated attacks that try every possible combination of characters. With enough time, the brute force method can crack any password. However, strong passwords are much harder to crack than weak passwords.
A weak password:
- Is no password at all.
- Contains your user name, real name, or company name.
- Contains a complete dictionary word. For example, “Password” is a weak password.
- Is a password that increments (Password1, Password2, Password3 …).
A strong password should be complex and therefore will be difficult to guess or crack. To be sufficiently complex, it should:
- Be at least 8 characters or longer.
- Use a combination of upper and lower case letters, and include at least one numeric and/or special character (&, ?, @, etc.), punctuation, and spaces.
- Be significantly different from previous passwords.
- Be a pass phrase or sentence. This is a very secure way of creating passwords that are both hard for others to crack and easy to remember by you. For example, “The root of all evil is money.” would become: “Troaei$.”
Other Important Information
- Never share your password with others.
- Do not base your password on personal information that someone who knows you may be able to guess.
- Avoid letting software save or store your passwords. Besides increasing the chance that someone will be able to access data on your computer or personal information, you are more likely to forget the password if you do not type it in regularly.
- Make sure you always log out of programs or websites and close browsers when you are done working with them, especially on public computers.
- Protect your passwords and treat them as valuables.
- Make your password easy to type quickly. This will make it harder for someone to look over your shoulder see it.
- Create different passwords for different accounts and applications. That way, if one account is compromised, your other accounts won’t be at risk.
- Change your passwords regularly, about every six months.
- Do not ever send your passwords via email.
This message brought to you by Mike P