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Computor Tips - All About Passwords

Posted: Thursday, June 25th, 2009

As a kid, many of us had secret passwords. We had them for clubs, for parties, almost everything we did had some sort of password to permit entry. Back in the day, those passwords were rather simple made up words, colors or even phrases. Spies had pass phrases to identify themselves to a cohort.

Today our entire online presence demands passwords prior to doing a given task from banking to paying bills to entering social networks and media. No logon or password, and you are stuck in no man's land!

However, not any password will do. A good password is an investment in protecting your computer and vital information! Today we need strong passwords that are not easy to decrypt.

Why Strong Passwords Are Needed

The bad guys are extremely sophisticated at what they do. A strong password should appear to be a random string of characters to an attacker. It should be 14 characters or longer, (eight characters or longer at a minimum). It should include a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols.

Hackers have many approaches to steal your passwords and thus your data. They use the so-called "dictionary" attack trying one word after another with the expectation that users will pick a word in the dictionary for their password.

Hackers also use "brute force" attack by automatically trying every combination of letters, numbers, and symbols that can be used as a password. The shorter your password, the fewer the combinations they need to check.

What Makes a Good Password?

Microsoft has an excellent guide to creating passwords on their site.
http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/create.mspx

Bottom-line:
Passwords should be at least 8 characters in length, keeping in mind that the shorter your password, the easier it is to crack.

• Passwords should contain a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters (:~!@#$%^&*()_+{}[]|<>).
• Do not use a word that can be found in a dictionary whether foreign or specialty terms.
• Very importantly, the password should be different from your logon or any permutation of it.
• Don't pick names or nicknames of people, pets, places, or personal information that can be easily found out, such as your address, birthday, or hobbies.
• Stay away from common keyboard sequences, such as gwerty1 or abc123.
• If you are thinking about making a password by just adding a digit to your favorite word, don't do it
• Do not use the same password on multiple accounts - for the simple reason that, if one of your accounts gets cracked, the hacker will have easy access to the others.
• Do Not Give Your Password To Anyone!

Why You Need to Change Your Password periodically?

It is a good idea to change your passwords on a regular basis. This way if hackers have been trying to crack your code they will be stymied as you have broken their pattern. It is just good common sense to protect your assets to the best of your ability and not get lazy about it. The strength of your password will help keep it good for a longer time. A password that is shorter than 8 characters should be considered only good for a week or so, while a password that is 14 characters or longer (and follows the other rules outlined above) can be good for several years.

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Showing 0 to 1 of 1 comment.

DidnÂ't know the forum rules aollwed such brilliant posts.

Posted by: Dorie | July 19th, 2011

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