Lets start with a list of the most common passwords used today, of the 1000 most common passwords approx 91% of passwords sued today appear on the list. The top 10 are…
1 password
2 123456
3 12345678
4 1234
5 qwerty
6 12345
7 dragon
8 pussy
9 baseball
10 football
If you are using one of these…CHANGE IT NOW
Lets do some Math!
If you are using a password with a length of 6 characters, you have the following number of combinations
numbers = 1000000
number and lowercase letters = 2176782336
full alpha set & numbers = 56800235584
Full Set of allowed printable characters set = 282429536481
Those are some large numbers, but dont forget todays computers are super fast and possible plow throw those combinations faster than you think.
What do you Recommend?
A password containing 10 characters is recommended for security
Let’s do more math for combinations of full character set
6 characters = 282429536481
8 characters = 645,753,531,245,761
9 characters = 45,848,500,718,449,031
10 character = 3,255,243,551,009,881,201
So how do I choose 10 character password?
Firstly, do not use names, birthdays, address etc. For me I like to choose a small sentence and change some of the characters to include uppercase, number and special characters. For example,
I like pasta would become iliK3p@st& (this is not my password)
Follow these basic rules and your password will be secure and chances of someone gaining access to your web-sites of email will dramatically increase.