Password security has been brought to the forefront again after the recent hacks and theft of passwords from Sony’s PlayStation network last week and Apple’s “location tracking” scandal. Now, there’s not much you can do with the password you gave Sony other than make sure that your other accounts have a different password, but you can try to make sure that the passwords you choose now and in the future give yourself the best protection from being the target of a hack.
Thomas Baekdal published an interesting article in 2007 where he looked at how long it would take someone via common hacking techniques to crack common types of passwords at a rate of 100 attempts a minute.
His results?
(image credits: baekdal.com)
Sounds like a more complicated, random password is better, right?
How about trying this particular method:
BAM.
How easy is it to remember real, short phrases rather than having post it notes everywhere with random characters? These types of passwords are both usable and secure – something of a “holy grail” for day-to-day users who have to deal with logging into many accounts everywhere.
Granted, this will only work on services that allow you to use special characters like spaces, but more and more services (at least the major ones like Google and Twitter and Facebook) allow you to use those characters. Having easy to remember, secure passwords also affords you a better chance of remembering different passwords by using a different phrase for each service you want to use.
There have been critics that say even 3 word passwords are more easily hacked than a gaggle of random characters and they would be right. But Baekdal brings up an interesting point in his rebuttal in that does it really make much of a difference if a password can be hacked in 2,537 years or 39,637,200 years? Chances are you won’t be alive in about 100 years so what’s the point of using a hard to remember password if no one is going to feasibly be able to hack it in their lifetime?
via: Lifehacker
Source: Baekdal.com
