Passwords!

I really do fear for people when I hear that they do internet banking, pay their bills online etc!

Why ? Cos I just know that they ( mostly ) don't know the basics of computer security and I could safely bet they use useless passwords.

Useless passwords are ones that can be guessed, or cracked with ease.

Most people use such passwords as they are easy to remember! If it's easy to remember it's easy to crack.

Use of any word that is in the English dictionary is what I would call a useless password, using a word that can be found in any language dictionary is useless.

And using "qwerty1" is worse than useless!

So never use any word or easy combination as they can be either guessed, or using a password cracking utility can be cracked pretty quickly.

A truly determined cracker if he/she gets a hold of your encrypted password can at their leisure attempt to crack it using software that will attempt pretty much every conceivable combination of characters.

May take a while, but doable.

However for the most part your pretty safe if you have a good strong password.

OK, what's a good password ? Well a truly random string of a least nine characters and letters would be a good start!

More would be preferable, thirteen or more would be great!

A good place to get such a password is here.

Note that the page is displayed over a secure link, so the password you download can't be intercepted (in theory!).

Each time you refresh the page it displays a different set of random characters.

You could use the entire 64 characters, or just chop off a chunk of 13 or so.

  Part 1  | Part 2 |

 

Cain and Abel!

Available from here

Any idiot can use something like Cain And Abel to crack passwords with some ease.