Trev's place

Hackers are getting smarter. They have learnt that most people will have one password that does it all. So once they get it from one place, it can be put into the automated robots to try it on every other site on the internet. Imagine if it’s your banking password as well as your Facebook password.

This article is not going to guarantee that you will never get hacked, but it will provide some idea’s to increase your protection from being hacked.

Rule 1: Your email password is the most important and should not be used for anything else. Reason: When this is hacked, all the thief needs to do is use the forgot password link on all other sites and they get your password for what ever you may be registered for.

How to come up with an easy to remember but hard to crack password. You use a phrase instead of a word. So think about where you went on holidays, or where your partner was born. Lets use the holidays one for the example. “Love Sydney” is the phrase that came to my mind. It really could be anything. You want to write it with correct case as well. So capital L for Love and capital S for Sydney. That gets 2 of the often required things for passwords. Now the spaces in your password. Some systems don’t like them so probably better to replace them. Decide on what you are going to use as the space. It might be the hash or a comma. We’ll use a hash for the example, so now our pass phrase is “Love#Sydney”. So we’ve got upper case and lower case. We’ve got special characters. Now we just want some numbers. Easiest one there is where you have a L and a O change them for a 1 and 0 except for the first character (some systems don’t like to start with a number). “L0ve#Sydney”.

Passwords should be at least 8 characters. An 8 char password takes a little over 2hrs to brute force crack. 10 characters is over 2,000 hours. Out example password will take 50,000 hours.

Now a way to have a unique password for each web site and be able to remember easily.

Use your password as a base and select characters from the web address to add into your password. Here is a example:

web site facebook.com. We’ll use from the right, the 2,5,6 letters. Always do from the right as some domains are very short which will break this. Remeber it’s always the same for every web site. So facebook the letters are oko. So use our space character and add the 3 chars to the end. “L0ve#Sydney#oko”.

It’s like anything new. It will take a little while to get used to it.

Remember, your email password needs to be unique and strong. I would make it at least 12 characters and I’d use a mixture.