Change Your Password Lately? You Should

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Change Your Password Lately? You Should

I get calls, support tickets, and family telling my that "My computer has been hacked, or my Facebook has be broken into. This is more common that one would think and my question is alway;

Have you changed your password lately?

As long as there have been computers there have been passwords to login to them. Many people including persons in IT use common non-complex passwords often using 123456, password, or the street for which they live.

Intel's blog notes that length is more important than complexity when choosing a password: "The password 'Br3ak1ead&7' would take a computer three days to crack, at 1,000 guesses per second. Meanwhile, the seemingly simple 'thunder showers before sunset' password, would take the same computer, guessing at the same rate, 550 years to crack."  Using strong passwords is highly recommended, password that contain uppercase letters, punctuation and numbers are a good start but as noted above length is often better than complexity.

I always suggest that the person write out a long sentence using a familiar verse, quote or line in a movie, then take the first letter from each word and substitute uppercase, numbers, and punctuation.

Example: I grew up in Novato, California and went to high school at Live Oak.

password would be:  IguiNCawthsalo.

You could take it a step further and sub a few letters for numbers as such,

new password:  Igu1NCawth5alo.

In this example I subbed the lowercase i for a 1, and the letter s for a 5. As you can see this is a very complex password however as noted in the Intel article a better solution would be a longer ramdom password. Both methods have their strong points as well as weaknesses you can check your examples here using Intel password checking tool

My example password Igu1NCawth5alo. when tested using the Intel tool gives the following results;
CONGRATULATIONS, It would take about 6858401 years to crack your password.

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