What's A Good Password And How To Be Secure??

I agree this isn't the best way to start a post. But I had no other way to present to you about how unsecure your password may be. The above table shows how long it will take for a computer to crack your password depending on how long it is, how many uppercase characters it contains and how many symbols or numbers it contains. Self explanatory I guess. So what's a good password to use?? You may find one looking at the table above.

Also this is a just rough view. If you want to know exactly how much time will it take to crack the password you use just visit this link and enter your password there.

HowSecurIsMyPassword.net

And yes the site is 100% secure, recommended by many bloggers and recommended by me only after reading a lot of reviews about it. So the first thing I did was that i typed my passwords there to see how secure they were. For one it says it will take 106 years, for other it says it will take 778 thousand years. 106 years is a long time isn't it. I dont think I m gonna live for that long.

Such a relief. I hope by this time you have tested your password and you know if its SECURE or NOT. So if it is pretty much secure you can leave now, feel proud and visit some of my other blog entries. But if you find out that it isn't safe I highly recommend that you read on and change your password to a much secure one today only. Better to be safe than sorry isn't it??

How to Choose a Good Password???

You may think that choosing a strong password isn't that difficult. If you use a password 8 characters long with a combination of letters and numbers you assume that it will be safe. That's normal I used to think like that too. Surprisingly the password karan12x would take just 3 hrs to be cracked. So there are some minimum requirements that you should follow when choosing a password.

1. Password Length:

A good password should be atleast 8 characters long. Preferably 10. The longer the better. For ex: the password karan123karan though looks really stupid and easy to crack it would take a thousand years to be cracked by a computer using brute force. So its a good password. Is it???

2. Combination of Characters, Letters and Numbers:

Make sure you have atleast one uppercase character, one lowercase character, 1 symbol, and 1 number in your password. That doesnt mean the pass 1#sQ is secure. The point is that the karaN123@ is 10 times more secure than the password karaN1234

3. Unguessable:

Lastly and this one is very important don't use a password that can be guessed by anyone. For ex: the password karan123karan although would take a thousand years to be cracked it can easily be guessed by someone who knows my name. So this password is actually stupid. I should also point if you follow point 2, honestly your password becomes almost unguessable. How on earth could someone guess a password like karAn9%a. Chances are pretty rare.

So a good password should be one which follows all the above points. And by all I do mean all.

Top 500 Most Common Passwords:

Now moving on here is a small part from the 500 most common passwords researched by WhatsMyPass.com. These represent the worst passwords you could choose. So a good password shouldn't be something that's in this list.

To view the complete list head on to Top 500 worst passwords of all time

If your password is among these 500 passwords, you aren't safe. Even a kid can crack your password. And its surprising to know that 1 out of 10 people use one of the password from this list. Sad to know that. I hope it reaches some of these people.

So my one recommendation would be to avoid any such pass shown in this list atleast. Notice that most of these passwords are just a combination of lowercase letters or numbers which is never safe. I hope you do realize what would be the consequences if someone steals your password. You may loose your privacy, someone may put malicious content on it, or in worst cases you can get into legal troubles too.

Make sure you have a safe password for all your important accounts.

Am I Safe Now?

You now have a pretty good password and you wonder am I safe now.? Yes you are but only partially. Much more secure than you were earlier this day. But windows isn't a secure operating system. Viruses and malwares are waiting to attack you. I want you to know that even if you are using a 100 digit password that would take trillion years to crack you still aren't safe. Why?? Because some guy could just send you an email with a Keylogger attached to it which would record all your key presses and send it to the hacker.