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:

Each password should be unique

This takes extra work on your part, for sure. But imagine what would happen if a hacker cracked just one of your passwords—a password that you use to access several different accounts. The hacker would now be free to sign in to any of the accounts using that password. Don’t make a hacker’s job any easier!

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).

And clean out the cloud

Don’t store any important passwords in the cloud, for the same reason as #7. Online storage is easily hacked into.

Sharing is not caring

Don’t log in to important accounts on shared computers (your home family computer is fine, as long as you trust everyone at home). This includes library computers, shared office computers, etc. The same goes for public internet connections, like a public wifi hotspot at a coffee shop, web proxies, free VPN or Tor.

How secure is my password?

There are several password strength meters available online to check the strength of your passwords (make sure the site has https before the web address, not http. Remember, “s” is for “secure”). One slightly different take that I like tells you the time it would take for different speed hacking programs to crack your password. It’s useful information to have, but take it with a grain of salt and make sure to read the note if you use this tool. These are great if you want to confirm the strength of passwords you got from our secure password generator.

Don’t lose your passwords

Encrypt and store your passwords in a few different locations. That way, if you lose access to your computer or account, you can get your passwords back quickly and easily.