Coming up with good passwords is the best way to keep your files secure. But what makes a good password? The first link on a Google search for "how to make a good password" gave me:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/create-strong-password-forget/ which suggests what a lot of websites I've made accounts for in the past suggested for making my password a strong one. And some suggestions for making a strong password that makeuseof lists is that your password should "contain special characters and numbers", "a mix of upper and lower case letters", and the use of random mixing in your substitution of letters like "B", or "b" for "8". And this advice seems rock solid since so many different sites regurgitate (and enforce) that these tips make your passwords strong.
But in reality these kinds of passwords are terrible because they are hard to remember. So you will most likely resort to writing down your password down on a piece of a paper so that you can log on to any of your various accounts. This is bad because if you lose that piece of paper you will lose access to all of your accounts since you can't remember any of them due to all the mixing and matching of letters.
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| xkcd: Password Strength Comic |
So what actually makes a good password? Good passwords are the ones that are long and easy to remember like 'correctbatteryhorsestaple' from
http://xkcd.com/936/. These kinds of passwords are strong since they have a large number of characters which means that a cracker's password program will have to guess more characters combinations to get access into your accounts. However, many crackers probably employ dictionary attacks with random combinations of 3 or 4 words to guess your passwords, so it's probably still a good idea to mix up some of the letters you use in your password to give yourself some extra security.
Hi Luke.
ReplyDeleteThat is a very good post. I believe that this is a huge responsibility for everyone to create good passwords to protect their computers and online accounts from any harm. I like how you added the details so that the readers can be fully prepared for creating their own passwords. If these passwords are hard, people should make notes on their sketchpad apps from their mobile phones for memorization. However, these passwords need to be private for themselves, not for strangers.
One suggestion is to edit your post for grammar/sentence structure errors. When I read it, some sentences sound kind of wordy.
You did a good job for communications and security post. Keep blogging!
Hey Luke, nice looking blog you have here. Good post about passwords. I actually had my e-mail account almost compromised twice. Both times were stopped by my e-mail provider though so I was lucky. Each time I made a more complex password but each time, hackers were able to brute force it. I feel that password should also contain numbers and special character like ‘#’. Also being case sensitive helps. It would make trying to brute force a password much harder. I look forward to reading more from you in the future.
ReplyDeleteI think most of the people make passwords based on concatenation of words that they remembers the most! While it is true that using such TYPE of password is a way to remember easily, at the same time it also makes password cracking easier since password is not random and has entire words instead of a part of different words concatenated. I feel passwords are an integral part of our internet life and basic steps should be followed to ensure security.
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