Tag Archive for 'One Man’s blog'

Weak passwords – easy hacks

Published by Valerie Horton on May 4, 2007 in General. 3 Comments Tags: , .

Does your password look like any of the following?

  • The name of your partner, child or pet
  • The last four digits of your social security number
  • 123456789 or 987654321 or any lower combination
  • Your last name, your city, college or football team
  • Your date of birth – or of you partner or child
  • The words: “password”, “god”, “dog”, “money” or “love” or any other word found in a standard dictionary
  • Or any of the above followed by a 0 or a 1?

I admit I WAS guilty of using one of the above common passwords. What about you?

John Pozadzides from One Man’s Blog reveals how hackers steal identity. http://onemansblog.com/2007/03/26/how-id-hack-your-weak-passwords/

Here are John’s tips to making your password more secure.

  1. “Randomly substitute numbers for letters that look similar. The letter ‘o’ becomes the number ‘0?, or even better an ‘@’ or ‘*’. (i.e. – m0d3ltf0rd… like modelTford)
  2. Randomly throw in capital letters (i.e. – Mod3lTF0rd)
  3. Think of something you were attached to when you were younger, but DON’T CHOOSE A PERSON’S NAME! Every name plus every word in the dictionary will fail under a simple brute force attack.
  4. Maybe a place you loved, or a specific car, an attraction from a vacation, or a favorite restaurant?
  5. You really need to have different username / password combinations for everything.”

So based on what John wrote I came up with what I thought was a jim-dandy-secure password, and ran it through Microsoft’s password strength tester. I came up medium. MEDIUM! This is harder than it looks.

So what’s the solution? The security experts out there recommend using a password manager like Roboform or PassPack that store your passwords and allow you to use a master password on all the sites you visit. Search “password manager” on Google to find other password managers programs.

Here’s the best part of a password managers – You only have to remember ONE MASTER password – the perfect solution for brain squeeze!

Valerie Horton