How a password generator can help you create a strong password

Do a quick Google search for “password hacking software”, and you will be shocked (and maybe appalled) at how many people sell programs design to crack your passwords and hack your accounts. You’ll also find questions from people around the world asking, “what are the best ways to hack someone’s password?” These are the people you need to protect yourself against.

Here are the top cyber security factors to make a strong password and accessing your accounts:

Longer is better

Depending on the hacking method used, a six-letter password, with no numbers or capital letters (“orange”, for example), may take up to 10 minutes to hack, or as little as 1 second if a fast attack hacking program is being used. By adding extra letters to our password (for example, “orangemarmelade”), it will now take months to hack, and adding numbers and special characters (“Orang3marme!ade”) will take centuries to crack, even using the most powerful hacking software. Put another way, changing “orange” to “oranges” will increase the amount of items a hacking program must search through 26 times, for 26 letters in the alphabet. But substituting a zero for the “o”, “0range” increases it 260 times (26 letters x 10 numbers), and “orange!” increases it up to 8,580 times! (26 letters x 10 numbers x up to 33 special characters).

No names, please

Don’t use your name, first, last or middle, as your password. The three passwords that a hacker will try first is, “password”, “123456” and different combinations of your name. Same goes for the names of family members, pets, friends, etc. A lot of this information is easy for hackers to find and they won’t hesitate to use it against you.

No important numbers

As with names, you shouldn’t use any numbers in your passwords that are easily discovered by hackers, including your date of birth, social security number, phone number, zip code, or anything similar. If you have trouble staying away from names and important numbers, PasswordsGenerator.com has a secure password generator that will take the guesswork out of it for you.

No real words

If it’s in the dictionary, it’s a real word, and it doesn’t belong in your passwords. There is an entire method of password hacking called “dictionary attack” that exploits people’s tendency to use dictionary words in their passwords.

To change, or not to change?

The standard recommendation is to change your passwords every 8-12 weeks. If you’re using a good random password generator to create strong passwords all the time, and storing them safely (see #13), then changing passwords regularly is a good security measure. If, however, changing passwords often will just make you go back to weaker, easy to remember passwords, like your pet’s name, don’t bother. It’s better to have a really strong password, and keep it forever, than to have a new weak password every 3 months.

Store passwords safely

We’ve already said that you shouldn’t store important passwords in your internet browsers or in the cloud, and we at PasswordsGenerator.com don’t recommend you keep them on a sticky note under your keyboard either. The best way to store your passwords is to memorize a few master passwords and manage them with a password management software, or store your other passwords in a plain text file and encrypt the file with 7-Zip, GPG or a disk encryption software.