Creating secure passwords
Many passwords are simple to guess and even easier for a computer to guess. This has resulted in the need to create longer and more confusing psswords.
With over 30,000 Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail accounts recently being hacked, organisations and individuals are thinking more about how to create passwords that are hard to guess.
One media source reported soon after the mass hack attack that many of the passwords were as simple as 12345678. It is also common to use password structures using the days of the month and the corresponding number of the month i.e. june6 then 123 etc afterwards to make up the minimal characters.
Names of children, pets, hobbies, and even favourite movie actors are all popular sources for passwords that can be easily guessed by a hacker with someone with simple social engineering skills such as a forged online quiz.
Popular password lists are easy to obtain and easy to test within a group of friends or colleagues with some amazing results.
Popular password list:
- password
- 123456
- qwerty
- abc123
- letmein
- monkey
- myspace1
- password1
- link182
- (your first name)
The most common reason for using such easy-to-hack passwords is simply the fact that they are easy to remember. This is coupled with the fact that many people think they will not be hacked or can not be hacked because their computer is in an organisation's network or because Microsoft is too clever to be hacked. The technology used by organisations and software/web companies does offer great security but an all-too simple password could render all security ineffective.
Suggestions for creating great passwords
Think of a sentence and use the letters from the sentence with some of the letters in capitals and some words with numbers in between. Such as the sentence:
"My dog always runs after the cat." A password could be “Mda3Ratc9. This is achieved by taking the first character from each word and adding two random numbers.
If you have multiple accounts and want multiple passwords to ensure your protection, the following example (obtained from Daily Blog Tips) is the perfect solution:
- The first digit is the number of characters on the name of the website.
- The second digit is “c” is the number in the first step was odd, and “t” if it was even.
- The third digit is the last letter of the name of the website.
- The fourth digit is “$” if the letter in the previous step was a vowel, and “%” if it was a consonant.
- The last three digits are the first three letters of the name of the website.
Using the algorithm above, your password on Twitter would be “7cr%twi” and on Facebook it would be “8tk%fac”.