Cracking a Hard Password

Cracking a Hard Password

Bess Batterham | 7/03/2011

How important is password strength?  The answer is very, cyber criminals use sophisticated tools that can rapidly decipher passwords or in some cases just get lucky with a wild guess. A friend's little sister just went through a teen nightmare when someone guessed her facebook password and took over her account. Writing vulgar status updates and then sifting through her inbox and making public some of her deepest darkest secrets. Worst thing that's happened to her in her life I'm sure and so avoidable if she had just made her password something stronger than just the word - password.

For most of us one of our biggest nightmares would be to have our bank account hacked into and it is actually not that rare. Online identify theft costs the Australian economy more than $1 billion a year with almost 4.5 million Australians are believed to have been victims.

Now think about how strong your password is, unless it is made up of a mixture of letters and numbers up to 14 characters long, it isn’t very strong at all. Which makes you think that your average customer would not bother to make a difficult password either. I stumbled across a company which has brought out a fun tool that you can implement on your website to ensure that users are going for a stronger password. It's called the naked password and a small image of a girl shows on the screen and as your password becomes stronger more of her clothes come off. Such a small image it does not fall into the NSFW category but an undressing girl is an undressing girl and I am sure most people will spend a bit of time cracking the code to get her kit off. I'm just hoping they bring out a male version, because it's not fair that only men are getting hard passwords.

tags: Common Sense ,  Tips & Tricks