Pro Hack

How not to get Hacked – Choosing the Right Password

Its a digital nightmare when your password gets hacked. Password compromise = your are fucked, straight away. And if  you do happen to be at an important position in a firm, and unfortunately find yourself the root cause of company’s security problems, its time to learn a few basics of choosing the right password. Be it your Email ID, terminal login, voicemail or anything that uses a generic password protection system,you need to choose a secure password for your digital ventures. Nevertheless, this simple guide is applicable to every netizen online who wants to secure himself by choosing the right password. Cause in the end, its your password that makes it easy, or hard for attackers to gain access to your account.

About Bad Passwords

Poor weak passwords have the following characteristics (if you have even one,make sure to change it) -

• Password size less than 15 characters
• Password is a word from dictionary

The password is -

• Name of family,pet,your favorite videogame character.
• Computer terms,commands,website name,hardware,software etc.
• Personal data like birthday,mobile phone numbers, address etc.
• Any of the above spelled backwards! or succeeded or preceded by a number or letter (password1, 1 password)
• In short any form of personal stupidity leads to tragic events :P

How to get hacked ?

• Reveal your password to any one.
• Reveal it in an email message,phone call,to your boss, give hints to others,share it with friends and co workers.
• Write it down somewhere.
• Keep same passwords for all your digital ventures, like emails, voicemails etc
• NEVER CHANGE IT.

In any case, if you want the opposite, follow the opposite :)

Making a STRONG Password

use phrases to form passwords, these are much secure to form and hard to guess.

for eg, the phrase -

“ This is a super secure password and is hard to hack :P ”

will form a password given below by taking the first letter and substituting similar sounding words with numbers. See..its quite hard to hack :)

“ Tiassp&ih2h:P ”

Use numbers, letters, uppercase and lowercase and mix them freely to form you password. make sure its not a dictionary word and DOES NOT CONTAIN any characteristic of weak passwords stated earlier.

A more secure version is to use passphrases to form passwords. A passphrase is a longer version of password and hence its more secure. Make sure its easy to remember,not a famous quotation and hard to guess by intuition

As Clifford Stoll says,

“ Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months “

He is damn right..just make sure you change it every month or more often to be secure.

I guess you will now be able to form secure passwords and deploy them fully.

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This post was written by: Rishabh Dangwal

Rishabh Dangwal is a no-nonsense network geek who likes to play retro games and emulators in free time. Follow him on Twitter