How a password generator can help you create a strong password

Each day, our lives become more inseparable from the internet; we email instead of call, we stay in touch with social media, we shop online, bank online, etc. And each of our online accounts requires a password. We all know that choosing a strong password is important for internet security, but nonetheless many of us opt for weak passwords simply because they are easier to remember and keep track of. While it is inconvenient to create very strong passwords, the potential fallout from having your accounts hacked will be much more inconvenient. Don’t worry; after reading this article, you’ll be a pro when it comes to knowing whether a password is strong, and we’ll give you a handy secure password generator to take some of the guesswork out of creating a strong password.

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 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.

Clean out your browsers

Turn off automatic passwords, auto login, and password storage on your web browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, etc.) Any password stored in this way can be hacked.

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.

“S” is for Secure

A strong password is no good if you transmit it willy-nilly. Only send sensitive information if you’re on a secure connection. A secure connection will say either “HTTPS” (as opposed to HTTP) or “SFTP” (as opposed to FTP). These connections are encrypted and much more difficult to hack than their counterparts.

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.