Tuesday, September 28, 2010

How secure is your password?

While catching up on a bit of reading, I came across Judy O'Connell's blog "Hey Jude" and the post Pass the [password] test.
Needless to say I went and had a play and my results were much the same as Judy found (only much worse!).
My banking password was cracked in one second, and a password that I call my 'generic' password and use for everything that I don't think needs to be secure came back with a result of 237 years.
The one thing which this test does not take into account however, is the use of personally identifiable information such as names, kids names, DOB etc that a person may find out about you in order to crack your password.
Be all means go have a play, but remember to have a password that is also not easily guessed!

Oh yeah, I have chosen a new password...

7 billion years? Much better :)

1 comment:

  1. But always remember, where are you typing your password? This guy went to the trouble of explaining how the site works, and that you can download the webpage to your computer, kill your internet connection, and the tests will still work, therefore ensuring that your password isn't stored in a database ready for selling. A good way to find out what makes a good password, though. A combination of upper and lowercase, numbers and symbols is now considered the norm for passwords, and they seem to start at 8 characters long! And the strangest passwords are quite secure... ie. a simple (!!) password like Asdf#369-1 will take about 17000 years to crack, and that's a really simple password to type and remember, once you realise the pattern...

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