by J.P. McCauley

Created on: June 15, 2009   Last Updated: July 02, 2009

There are a number of way in which your Internet passwords can be stolen. Some of the methods used to steal passwords are: monitoring unencrypted network traffic; tricking a user into entering a password on a bogus web site or even giving it to someone on a phone call; looking for a password among written notes; guessing simple passwords such as names of people or pets; and plain old brute force attempts. A brute force attempt is simply guessing all possible passwords until the correct one is found. Some sites are secure enough to foil brute force attempts by locking accounts after a number for failed login attempts, but it is your responsibility to create a strong enough password that make brute force attempts more difficult.

In theory, the brute force method of password cracking tries all possible combination of characters in order to arrive at the correct password. In practice, this could take an incredibly long time. To speed things up, password crackers rely on the fact that most users do not use strong passwords. Many users create passwords of seven characters or less, and often use actual words or names. Dictionary attacks leverage this fact and limit the brute force guesses needed to a pre-arranged list of words (including foreign languages). This will vastly reduce the amount of time it takes to crack a password assuming the password is not a strong one.

So, what makes for a strong password?
- Do NOT use actual words or names
- Use eight characters as the minimum length (longer is better)
- Passwords should be a mix of capitalization, numbers and special character (!, @, #, $, etc)
- Do not repeat characters too often
- Do not assume simple, obvious substitutions are enough (M@ryJ0nes instead of MaryJones)
- Change your password on a regular basis

If you require a very secure password, you may want to consider using an online password generation site. Here is a list of a few.
http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/
http://www.goodpassword.com/
https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm

There is a problem with these sites, however. Although it makes it almost impossible for a password cracking program to guess your password, it also makes it almost impossible for you to remember it. Now that is secure!

Creating your own passwords makes it much easier for you to remember them, but you have to be vigilant about making sure they are strong enough. You can employ some simple cryptography methods to help strengthen up you passwords. For example, you can

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