With the growing number of hacking and scamming attempts, the need for creating stronger passwords is more than ever. I strongly believe that we all have been warned about or advised to choose passwords that are hard to guess and crack.
This article explores how you can create stronger passwords that are hard to guess and crack.
Why You Might Need a Password
Right. That’s a pretty good question before anything else. The primary use of passwords is authentication. It can also be used to verify identity in certain special circumstances, however, the former is the main reason most of us use passwords.
From social media accounts to email and bank account access, everything digital that we can think of requires a password to be safely accessed. Most passwords are created at the time of signing up for a service, while some are required to be set at a later time, usually following an automated password delivery and reset request.
We use passwords to secure all sorts of personal and confidential information. Passwords have become an important part of our digital life and must be guarded at all times.
Weak Passwords
We generally tend to forget the passwords we set. This can be a huge inconvenience, especially if you have multiple accounts and use different passwords for each of them. To avoid this slight inconvenience, we often choose weak passwords, or passwords that are easy to remember.
Weak passwords are ones that can be cracked or guessed in a short amount of time. They often use dictionary words, or names of people and their loved ones, including pets. Weak passwords have also been seen to contain dates that may be both important and public. Sometimes, we overlook the fact that our date of birth might actually be published somewhere. In most cases, this would be an improperly secured social media account. Even in the case of a properly secured social media account, if a potential attacker gains access to the profile of a friend of yours, they can see the information you have chosen to share only with your listed friends – including your date of birth.
Common sequences are also considered weak passwords. For exmaple, ButterFly1234 is a very easy-to-guess password as it uses both dictionary words and a common numerical sequence. For someone who has a son name Ben, who was born on 19th March 1994 is also making a huge mistake by creating and using the password BenTurner1994, as it is considered a weak password.
Choose Stronger Passwords
It is common to think that the passwords we create are strong, even though they may be weak ones. Now it isn’t that we all can remember strings of random letters, numbers, and symbols, but it could be worthwhile to add symbols and slightly change the way we choose our passwords.
For example, instead of using BenTurner1994 as a password, we can modify it and include symbols to make it stronger. B3ntUrnEr&19#94? is a far stronger password, and according to online tools, could take centuries to crack this password using common hacking tools. The simpler version of it, BenTurner1994 could take as little as 3 hours to crack using the same set of hacking tools.
Use a Password Manager
We understand that the biggest challenge when choosing stronger passwords is remembering them. To make remembering strong (and a lot of) passwords easy, we highly recommend using a reputable password manager to store your username and passwords.
If you own an iPhone, MacBook, or iPad, you could use Apple’s built-in password manager. On MacBooks, this is known as Keychain Access. We are aware of other services that offer this functionality, but caution must be taken on who to trust. In our experience, Bitwarden has been tried and tested by many independent pen-testers to be reliable and trustworthy, and you can even spin your own instance of Bitwarden if you have the know-how.
