How to Create a Strong Password. The U. S. government recently revamped its password recommendations, abandoning its endorsement of picking a favorite phrase and replacing a couple characters with symbols, like c. R. These short, hard to read passwords look complicated to humans but very very simple to computers. Instead, you want long, weird strings that neither computers nor people can guess. Humans are bad at coming up with thesewe all pick the same random words, and were bad at remembering actually random strings. Follow this guide to make good passwords, or better yet, let an app make and remember them for you. Make your passwords very long. Your enemy isnt some guy in a ski mask trying to guess your password one try at a time. Its a program that automatically runs through massive databases of common passwords or random combinations of characters. The best answer to that is a very long string of words. As the webcomic xkcd famously pointed out, a bunch of plain words is pretty good. But as many hackers use dictionary attacks to guess regular words, its best to add some capital letters, special characters, or numbers. Dont use a common phrase. But dont use the same bunch of plain words as everyone else. If your password consisted of the entire script of Hamlet, it would still be unsafe if everyone else had the same password. When in the course of human events is a shitty password. So is a famous movie line, or a Bible verse, or even an acronym of a Bible verse. As weve established time and again, your clever tricks arent protecting your password. If you orRead more Read. And dont get clever with thematic or personally meaningful passwords. Sometimes humans do try to crack passwords, so dont help them out by using your sons birthday or the phrase printed on your favorite coffee mug. Test your password. If you use a password manager, itll test your password in real time, on the safety of your computer. The sites How Secure Is My Password, How Big Is Your Password, and How Strong Is Your Password But they wont warn you about common guessable phrases, like those Bible verses. Of course, typing your passwords into unfamiliar sites is a bad habit.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
November 2017
Categories |