All About Passwords

Why strong passwords are important?

While going out of the home, we take care of its security by using the best and multiple locks isn’t it?  Why? Our home has valuable things which need to be protected from robbers. Like the same, using strong passwords for all types of your online and bank accounts are most important to guard it from hackers as it might contain some valuable information.

Password plays a vital role in the digital age and everyone is using it to manage different types of accounts. Many people are using poor passwords like names, date of birth, nick name, numbers 1-10 which are easily predictable. Passwords can be cracked in variety of ways, let’s read some ways below.

In short, Passwords like underwear,

• Change Yours Often.
• Do Not Share Them With Anyone.
• Be Mysterious.
• The Longer The Better.
• Do Not Leave Yours Lying Around.

!So Keep your password hidden from everyone!

Did you know how passwords are stolen?

Due to insecure passwords, many bank accounts and email accounts have been successfully broken by the special programs designed for it and viruses and by guessing the weak passwords.

1. Programs are available which run every word in the dictionary against the username to find the match. This is called Dictionary-based attacks.

2. Programs designed to try with the combination of key strokes together with the username to find the password. This process is called Bruce force attack.

3. While you enter your username and password in cybercafé or public library, hackers might watch it closely.

4. You might get phishing emails or messages asking for your personal details including your password and you might respond to it.

5. Intended programs can be used to find the common passwords like birth date, pet name etc. These guessing programs could search for a previous spelled word.

Some Password Statistics

• Number of online accounts that an average user has: 25
• Number of passwords that an average user has: 6.5
• % of US consumers that use 1-2 password across all sites: 66%
• Number of times an average user login per day: 8
• Average password length: 8
• Most commonly used password: password1
• % of users that use personally meaningful words: 54.9%
• % of users that use the ‘Remember my password’ function: 28.6%
• % of users that write down their password: 15%
• Average time users maintain the same password: 31 months.

Source of the statistics:-

Microsoft, cnet, Gartner, SURL

Tips to create strong password (How to create strong password?):-

Creating secure passwords for all your accounts would help to prevent the password cracking. Here are some tips which allow you to create strong password.

1. Create the password with longer length; at least with more than 8 characters. The longer the password, the more safety account.

2. Add some numbers and special characters to the password alphabets.

3. Mix meaning less words, numbers and symbols to generate a strong password.

4. Practice a pass phrase password with blank space or hyphen like “My favourite and lucky number is 5 and 7” or its short form like “mfalni5a7” or I-love-to-write.

5. Just a combination of upper and lowercase alphabets in a particular format.

What not to do when creating the password:

As it is vital to protect your account with a good password, it would be good if you are not using any of the password creating type listed below

1. Same as username, combination of username and the numbers 123 or part of your username.

2. Consecutive numbers or alphabets like “12345” and “abcde” or in reverse sequence.

3. Personal information like phone number, house number, date of birth, vehicle number, nick name and close friend name etc.

4. Dictionary or foreign words, proper nouns, doubling up a single word and simple reverse words.

5. With the word password like “123password”, “passwordabcd” and so on.

Additional tips to use your password safely:-

1. Practice to have different passwords for your different accounts and change it often.

2. Password cache in the windows is not secure, so avoid enabling the “save password” option.

3. Never write down the password or share it to anyone.

4. Don’t send the passwords through mails, phone messages or other unsecured channel.

5. Using the clear or familiar phrases or proverbs should be avoided.

Still you are not compromised with the listed tips and need more protection to your accounts, try these following effective tips.

Effective tips to create strong password:-

1. Use Keyboard Pattern:

You can create strong passwords by patterns. If password “TTW.com@7890″ then create a password as “YYE/vp,#890-“

Basic concept behind this is, enter the immediate key to the right, what you wanted your password to be (just check the keyboard pattern):-

T -> Y
T ->Y
W -> E
. -> /
c -> v
o ->p
m ->,
@ -> #
7 -> 8
8 -> 9
9 -> 0
0 -> –

One can have numerous patters for creating a very strong password, you took 1 key to the right, and it could be 2 keys to the right or 1 key to the left, anything.

2. Key logger Protection:

If you need to protect the passwords from key loggers, then try this one; say your password is “TTW.com”; then you can write the following text on the notepad as “TWETdEW45.$cgto$5mHR”. Now you should copy paste 1-1 character in password field. By this, it will be almost impossible for a key logger to track your password.

3. Use Password tools:

• Use Diceware (http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html) to create strong passphrase password

• Microsoft test site (http://www.microsoft.com/security/pc-security/password-checker.aspx?WT.mc_id=Site_Link) is a password strength checker which can be used to check the strength of the created password.

• Use password manager tools like Lastpass and Keypass to store the passwords as it encrypt the password to keep safe and to automatically fill at any website.

• Try the password generator tool like Wolfram Alpha to create secured passwords.

Some strong password examples:

Excellent	Bad
L!i@o#n$t%i^g&e*r	liontiger
M1e2r3la4n	merlyn
I-love-to-eat-sweets	Ilovesweets
Mmffirad(my fav.food is roti and dhal)	rotianddhal
1$2&3)4	1234

Conclusion:

Strong password is one that is informal to remember and difficult to guess. As the password allows you to access important accounts like bank, credit card and email, it is essential to create strong passwords to protect your valuable information. If you don’t care to create the strong password, then your treasured account would be cracked by hackers or scammers.

Just practice to complex passwords with some special characters for your computer and online accounts. Create a unique password for every website where you access the data. Fill with difficult answers while answering to the security question of password creation to make the hackers tough to predict your password. Be sure to log-off properly from the websites you are accessing and alter its passwords frequently.

Use these password creation and protection tips effectively and protect your valuable online and computer accounts from hackers. How you used to create passwords for your various accounts?

Suggest or share some unique techniques here to create the strong password.

[color-box]Bonus: Now, you are aware of everything that you need to know about passwords. Great! Let’s have a look on online password managers that you can use to manage your passwords. Here is the link: http://ttw.tips/2bCQ5M5

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