I know you hardcore techno geeks need two hands and your left foot (unless you’re left handed) to enter your super-duper cryptic password that you update every 17 days.
As for everyone else, they think they’re super cryptic if they add β@β to their p@ssword.
But you don’t have to have a super crazy, impossible password to make your accounts safe.
Case in point, here’s a password that takes over 35 quadrillion years to break:
π
[Image via Bruno Santos via Compfight cc]
Dale says
Is there a site we can test the length to crack a password?
Eric Dye says
Yes! There should be a link in this post that should do the trick. π
Paul Prins says
I like that intel graphic, but it seems to continue pushing forward the idea that we need to be using all these random chars in our daily passwords (since most people will just look at the password and not notice that it’s a length is better then complexity).
The best thing to use is a phrase that is easy to remember because it is the length that is the issue. Most brute force attack systems will loop over your chars (after going through the basics like ‘iloveyou’, ‘12345’, and ‘123456’). So the type of charecters you use is a bit irrelivent, but for each additional character your add you force it to loop over everything it’s done before dozens of times. Phrases are awesome because they are much easier to remember – ‘BlackSheepNeverGetIceCream’.
I’ve thought about calling them passphrases intead of passwords. For now we aren’t because it would just confuse more people then it would help.
Eric Dye says
This is excellent, Paul. You should write for us! π
Ken says
When I was a kid, they had passbooks. Talk about tough to break. π
My Facebook page got hacked too many times. Now it’s passphrase has 80 characters, including spaces.
We’ll see what happens.
Ken says
Sometimes I hate spellcheck. Even it now misuses “it’s”.
Eric Dye says
Wow. That’s intense. π