In response to a request in another thread I would like to offer some help to prevent you from being hacked. To protect your privacy you must have secure passwords for internet sites. You want passwords that are easy to remember and hard to guess. Never choose a name, whether it is the name of a family member or a pet. Never choose a word that you can find in the dictionary or double words like catcat (catcat is one of the top 3,560 most used passwords and could be cracked almost instantly). Never use the same password for a number of different sites.
Malicious software often employs a dictionary attack to obtain your password. At electronic speeds these crackers apply every possible word in the dictionary, a comprehensive list of names and list of common short phrases to your password for a given application. To give you an idea at the speed these programs work they can test over 100,000 passwords per second and an individual computer can test between 1 million and 15 million passwords per second against a weak password.
The requirements for most passwords is a minimum length of 6 to 8 characters and may have a maximum of up to 64 characters. Strong passwords contain MORE THAN ten upper and lower case letters numbers and special characters. Length really is king. However some sites do not let you enter all these options which tends to show you how secure the site or program really is (or isn't). Here are four easy steps to create strong and easy to remember passwords.
1. Choose a phrase
2. Add a number
3. Add special characters
4. Associate it with a website.
Step one start with a simple phrase with which you are familiar with. For example let's say my name is John Smith and we use: "John Smith is the number one prepper".
Step two is to add a number. Replace the word one with the number 1: "John Smith is the number 1 prepper".
Step number three add a special characters (some websites won't let you do this but most financial institutions do): Replace the word number with the # sign: John Smith is the # 1 prepper".
This is a little long so let's replace John, is, the and prepper with the first letter of each word and also take out the spaces: JSmithit#1p
This is a pretty strong password but we can go one step further.
Step number four associate it with a website. You can do this several different ways for example adding the a prefix or suffix with a short form to a link for a particular site such as:
IPN for this site or Fb for Facebook or em for your email. You can use either upper or lower case letters or a combination of both.
JSmithit#1pIPN for this site
FbJSmithit#1p for Facebook
JSmithit#1pem for your email
Now you have very strong passwords. Your passwords are as safe as you can reasonably make them. However using something called a Brute Force Attack which will eventually compare every possible character to every position in your password it may be possible to crack it but it will take a very long time.
Now for fun try the link http://www.howsecureismypassword.net . Type in one of your old passwords and press enter. The site will show you how long it would take an average desktop computer to crack your password. You will be surprised at how little time it might take from seconds for a weak password such as 1234a would take 0.02 seconds to crack. A slightly better password like goleafs would take about 2 seconds. A more thoughtful but still weak password like 9times9 about 19seconds or perhaps 2lovedogs about 7 hours.
Now type in one of the passwords we just generated JSmithit#1pIPN and you see it would take about 2 billion years to crack. A very, very long time!
If you do not want to go to the effort of creating your own strong password the site above has a link to its sister site http://www.makemeapassword.net which will instantly create a secure password for you and giving you the option of using spaces numbers and symbols. For more information on passwords follow the link: http://howsecureismypassword.org/