Larmeir.com | Dustin Larmeir's tech blog.

Jan/10

22

Use strong passwords! If not you are asking for it.

Password strength is incredibly important! Having worked in the Tech industry for years I have seen so many servers get rooted, hacked and owned simply by a bruteforce attack or password guess. Realistically this should not be a problem but many people feel that passwords such as “password”  “hellokitty” or whatever is strong enough. Generally as a guideline you will want a mixed lower case, upper case, alpha numeric passwords with special characters. An example of such a password is below:

U$34r341P4$$W0rdN00b13t!!

The key characteristics of a strong password are in this password above and this can be used as a guideline. Yes they are harder to remember but almost impossible to guess through a brute force. An example of what ignorance about password strength can do is in this article below:

http://news.techworld.com/security/3210769/users-on-hacked-site-used-trivial-passwords/?olo=rss

290,000 accounts were hijacked on this website. If that doesn’t hit home I don’t know what will. Keeping a strong password not only keeps you safe but also keeps others safe from you.  In case you want a autgenerated password, you can use something like this: http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/ – this will do it for you :)

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2 Comments for Use strong passwords! If not you are asking for it.

Marianthe Verver | January 26, 2010 at 11:30 am

Dustin,

I completely agree. I think another good point is to also change your passwords from time to time even if you are not prompted to do so. There are some services that help with managing multiple passwords (ie OpenID) but I don’t feel as comfortable using those yet.

What are your thoughts on password managers?

Marianthe

Author comment by dlarmeir | January 27, 2010 at 9:19 pm

Hi Marianthe! I agree about password change policies and I think password managers can be dangerous as well, because if the password manager is exploited somehow then you have a real problem. For me the ultimate password manager is my Brain :)

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