It's important to have a good password for your online accounts; to best combat and minimize hacker threats. A lot of online web servers use the best online security, for example, hotmail is Microsoft emailing hosting, they use some of the best firewalls/encryption that can be offered, but yet I have personally seen some of my friends account get hacked in very easily, and the root to the security compromise is the lack of a good password.
According to this NBC News tech article:http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/8-character-passwords-just-got-lot-easier-crack-f1C7530242
"A password expert has shown that passwords can be cracked by brute force four times faster than was previously thought possible. ", "Jeremi Gosney of the Stricture Consulting Group shared the findings at the recent Passwords^12 conference in Norway, where researchers do nothing but focus on passwords and PIN numbers. What Gosney showed is that a computer cluster using 25 AMD Radeon graphics cards let it make 350 billion — that's right, billion — password attempts per second when trying to crack password hashes made by the algorithm Microsoft uses in Windows."
As the article continues to state this claim, "Eight characters "just isn't long enough for a password these days," Sophos Labs' Paul Ducklin told NBC News in an email. "Even before this latest 'improvement' in cracking, standalone GPU (graphics processing unit)-based servers could do the job on eight-character Windows passwords in under 24 hours." "
So you need to make your passwords longer than 8 characters. 23 Characters long password are nearly crack proof because of the mass amount of resource are not easily available. We are talking about you need to have some of the worlds most powerful super computer to be begin to crack those long passwords.
Here are some tips to shared from that article that can help better protect your online accounts, and I will also add in ways to better remember new passwords, without sacrificing security.
1) Never use the same password on the different accounts. This just makes sense. because we all have data bases on our computers that will likely content all of the accounts we even signed up to. If that information where to fall into the wrong hands all the hacker would have to do in know one password to get into them all. It's not just what's on your computer, but if a number of web servers get compromise with all of those different linked to your IP address the lazy hacker now has the same easy job of breaking in.
2) Use Complex passwords. For example, "Guinness_ROCK@#!2014_01" (without quotes). Most website will allow you to add in special symbols, and up to 23 character. An example of one site that will let you do this is google. In fact they will let you make a password that is 27 characters long.
3) If you do run into a site that doesn't let you use special character, still try to make a password that is 23 characters long but use UPPER case, lower case letters, and a mix of numbers to still keep your account secure. For example, GUINnessROCKSatYR201401.
Personally, any site that doesn't allow you to use special character may not be using the best method of security protection, so with any online account sign up on using that server is both not going to be hosting any important information, and will not be use as my primary.
If you want to test out a password you can use this site:
https://howsecureismypassword.net/ It states that they don't steal peoples passwords, but I wouldn't go off testing a password that either I currently use or about to use fully. Always change it up.
Now for the main part of this thread. You might be asking your self How do I remember all of these long passwords.
The answer is very simple. Just change one thing to your password and to a computer cracking program it's like you just made up an whole entire new password.
For example,
email #1
Guinness_ROCK@#!2014_01
email #2
Guinness_ROCK@#!2014_A2
email #3
Guinness_ROCK@#!2014_B3
Or just add in an extra character.
email #1
Guinness_ROCK@#!2014_01
email #2
Guinness_ROCK@#!2014_01A
email #3
Guinness_ROCK@#!2014_01A1
You can go up to the maximum numbers of characters allowed in the service register panel.
The thing is you might think this maybe increasing the risk of someone getting all of your so-called hard to break in online accounts, but you have to know that computers are very dumb. adding characters or changing numbers increases the difficulty of you password being cracked.
I hope this thread was helpful to someone. donate if you want.
