by David Lim
Whether you are running an online business, or just an individual whose main online activity is Facebooking, watching YouTube videos and checking your email, you will definitely be a member of numerous websites and have passwords to access those sites. You can invest in the best software that protects your computer from all the viruses, trojan horses, spywares and keyloggers, and make It a point to never write down or tell someone your password, your password can still be stolen.
You see, one way that a hacker can steal your password is to simply guess. Assuming a password length of 10 characters, and say, 100 possible combinations for each character, there are 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible passwords. That's quite a big number, and quite impossible to guess.
But, since remembering a password is a pain, many people will choose an easy to remember one. They will use their personal information as part of their password or their password itself, and that makes the hacker's job so much simpler and profitable. So, if you want to put the hacker out of a job, you might want to consider the following tips for your password:
Include Many Character Types
That means including upper case, lower case and numeric characters. And, if the website allows it, do also include special characters like the comma, exclamation mark, etc. By including as many different sets of characters as you can, you have exponentially increased the difficulty of guessing your password.
No Personal Information
Don’t include any kind of personal information into your password. That will include your birthday, your dog’s name, the city you were born in, etc. On the Internet, a lot of this information is actually available, or can be found by anyone who knows how to look for it. If you include any personal information into your password, a hacker might be that much closer to discovering your password.
No Words or Names
Don't use any words or names as part of your password. That includes foreign words from other languages as well. And do not use terms or words from the medical dictionaries, or from other specialized fields. In other words, no non random character combinations should be used.
No Patterns or Sequences
Any kind of pattern or sequence should be avoided. That will include any of the following:
Any names, dates, words or other any other items that is spelled backwards.
Any obvious sequences like "123456" or "QWERTY", or even "314159265".
Easy to Remember, Hard to Guess
Try to choose a password that is easy for you to remember or derive but hard for a third party to guess. But the password cannot include any personal information, words or obvious patterns or sequences as noted above. One technique would be to choose a phrase that is easy for you to remember, and take the first characters of the phrase as part of your password. Or, better still, use the second characters instead of the first. And then use a similarly hard to guess rule for another part of your password that would include digits and special characters.
Conclusion
You might think that some of the precautions suggested here seem a little too extreme. In the light of a hacker manually inputting each guess of your password into the keyboard, I would totally agree. All you need to do is to combine your dog’s name with your mother-in-law’s middle name, and spell that backwards, and it’s going to take forever for that hacker to be able to guess your password.
But I’m sure that any hacker worth his salt is not going to be inputting anything manually. He will probably have all the dictionaries of all the languages, specialized dictionaries of all the various trades, a database of your personal information, and software that will have algorithms familiar with the usual password strategies searching for the most probable combinations for your password. Considering that the software can probably make hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of attempts at your password each second, there is a good chance that if you chose a weak password, it will not be too long before a hacker is enjoying the latest blockbuster on his big screen TV, which he ordered online....using your credit card!
David Lim is the webmaster of http://QuittingYourJob.com, a business resource for the entrepreneur looking to start, or grow an online home-based business.
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