These days, it isn’t good enough just to have a password that someone else won’t guess. In order for your password to be secure it should be long – a minimum of 8 characters is standard – with a wide array of letters, numbers, and symbols. The need for this complexity comes from the advancement of password crackers, sometimes called password recovery programs, which can test several millions of pass-phrases per minute.
Here are a few things to never use as a password:
- your name
- your username
- your pet’s name
- your birthday
- your SSN
- your phone number
- your bank PIN
- a dictionary word
- a name
- any password shorter than six characters
Length is shown to have a large impact on crack time. Password length to crack time is an exponential function. Therefore, by adding one character to the end of any given password, it does not just make it more difficult to crack by a constant multiple, but rather, the exponent in the equation is incremented by one.
Password Length:
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