Many people take for granted the importance and security of their passwords. In my experience as a Desktop Support person, I’ve seen people write down their passwords on post-its or pieces of paper and stick it on their computer monitor, some even share their passwords with friends or family members. It’s either that or they use weak and very predictable passwords like their pet’s name or their birth date.
Aside from negligence, the reason why some people’s email accounts or social network accounts gets easily hacked is because they use weak passwords. A good example of a weak password would be “password” which is #1 in the list of most commonly used passwords online. So what is a strong password? Strong passwords are relatively long (at least 8 characters) and uses a combination of lower and upper case letters, digits and symbols.
If you’re having a hard time creating or thinking of a strong password,
here are some tools that can help you:
Websites:
Offline Programs:
Firefox Add-ons:
- SecurePassword Generator
- Magic Password Generator
Now that you have a strong password, please keep it and guard it with your life. That might be a little exaggerated but I know you get my point. I hope that after you read this post, you won’t be too lazy or negligent with your passwords and that you’ll practice safe computing from now on.
So how secure is your password? What are your methods of choosing or creating passwords? Do you know of other reliable password generators? Do you have any experiences of having your accounts hacked? Please share it with us.
Btw, do you know that Windows XP has a secret password generator? If you wanna know how to use it, you’ll have to come back next time because there’s not much time left to talk about it here. So stay tuned!
@trench – To be honest with you, I never owned a pager so I don’t know anything about page code. Hehe :D
Where were you in the pager age!
Ex. I Love You is 1 701711 4011 If your not savvy with the coding before cells were out, then its a bit difficult, but I use pager code along with key words and makes passwords easy for me to remember but difficult to crack.. :mrgreen:
@ JP aka elmo – that’s very interesting. and equally worrying.
@JP – Your friends are lucky to have a friend like you! It’s good that you found out about it before someone else did. Question is, did they change their passwords after you informed them about it? :)
Yeah, some people have the tendency to use the same password for all their online accounts. I guess it’s because it’s more convenient than having to create and memorize a different password for each account.
Btw, thanks for dropping by! :)
i remembered trying to break-in to my friends email accounts. 3 of them were using “password” as their password. Worst, if someone (rather than me) was able to log-in, that person could access my friends other accounts as well (bank, friendster..). Good thing I informed my friends about it. :cool: Some even made their passwords the same with all of their online accounts. Yikes!
@P.I.N.O.Y.U.N.I.T.E.D – Same here. I always talk about or preach on practicing safe computing. Yeah, I’m familiar with that feature of WP.com accounts coz I have one with them which I hardly use now. Hehe :D
Yeah, it would be nice if most if not all programs had this type of safety feature.
Most people here in the US say that California has the best weather because it’s not the hottest weather in summer and not the coldest in winter. Although summer can be very hot especially if you’re in the valley. :)
Couldn’t emphasize enough the importance of a very strong password. Just tried wordpress.com platform and it tells you if you’re password is weak, strong etc…
Wouldn’t it be nice if this feature is built in on every plaform that requires users to log-in. That’ll be fantstic.
A bit out of the topic (feel free to delete this line if you like), how’s the weather like in southern california overall? Weather here had been appalling this year (UK). One only hopes for a sunny weather all year round.
@Dre – Yeah, it is quite long for a password but hey, if it works for you then why not? :)
@Jaypee: Yep, my brother even says that my password is too long!
@trench – Page code? You mean like “i love you” = “1-4-3”? Is that what you’re talking about? If not, can you give me an example? Better to be paranoid than having a weak password, right? Hehe :)
I use pager code for my passwords!! Old school pager code makes for great password protection. My bank account passwords are nuts! LOL
@Dre – 20 characters? Whoaaa..that’s a lot! I think even bruteforcing that would take a very long time before it gets cracked. Hehe :D
I believe that my password is strong because it has more than 20 characters and is a combo of numbers and letters, uppercase and lowercase letters too :P
I’m not kidding dude! :mrgreen: My classmates couldn’t even believe it when I told them.
It’s ironic but hackers easily cracked their password because it’s based on personal info that was publicly accessible like parents’ name, date of birth, even the anniversary of their relationships.
But I quickly dropped that password when I opened a second Hotmail account which I used until I got a Gmail invite. Never was a Yahoo! fan myself. :lol:
@Jetman – Thanks for sharing these resources! I’ll check it out later. :)
Try this Password Generator + Password Strength Checker: itsimpl.com
@jhay – For real? What year was that? Good thing your email password wasn’t hacked. :)
@fruitoaty: :lol: :lol: :lol: No kidding?! That’s the same password for my very first email account with Hotmail. Surprisingly it worked for me back then, hahaha
@fruityoaty – Maybe the person who created that password thought that since it’s a software development company, no one would think that they would actually use password as the password. Or probably, it was a default password that they forgot to change. :D
True story: I worked in a software development company as a temp contractor… and I found one computer in the office that had the password… as “password”.
Pathetic.