Thursday, October 13, 2016
How not to get Hacked – Choosing the Right Password
How not to get Hacked – Choosing the Right Password
Its a digital nightmare when your password gets hacked. Password compromise = your are fucked, straight away. 
About Bad Passwords
Poor weak passwords have the following characteristics (if you have even one,make sure to change it) -
- Password size less than 15 characters
- Password is a word from dictionary
The password is -
- Name of family,pet,your favorite videogame character.
- Computer terms,commands,website name,hardware,software etc.
- Personal data like birthday,mobile phone numbers, address etc.
- Any of the above spelled backwards! or succeeded or preceded by a number or letter (password1, 1 password)
- In short any form of personal stupidity leads to tragic events :P
How to get hacked ?
- Reveal your password to any one.
- Reveal it in an email message,phone call,to your boss, give hints to others,share it with friends and co workers.
- Write it down somewhere.
- Keep same passwords for all your digital ventures, like emails, voicemails etc
- NEVER CHANGE IT.
In any case, if you want the opposite, follow the opposite :)
Making a STRONG Password
use phrases to form passwords, these are much secure to form and hard to guess.
for eg, the phrase -
“ This is a super secure password and is hard to hack :P ”
will form a password given below by taking the first letter and substituting similar sounding words with numbers. See..its quite hard to hack :)
“ Tiassp&ih2h:P ”
Use numbers, letters, uppercase and lowercase and mix them freely to form you password. make sure its not a dictionary word and DOES NOT CONTAIN any characteristic of weak passwords stated earlier.
A more secure version is to use passphrases to form passwords. A passphrase is a longer version of password and hence its more secure. Make sure its easy to remember,not a famous quotation and hard to guess by intuition
As Clifford Stoll says,
“ Treat your password like your toothbrush. Dont let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months “
He is damn right..just make sure you change it every month or more often to be secure.
I guess you will now be able to form secure passwords and deploy them fully.
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