The truth about keeping your passwords safe.

The truth is, no password is safe. Given enough time a sophisticated and dedicated attempt to break a password is possible regardless of it’s complexity.

But luckily, there are things that can you can do to significantly increase the strength of your password and it might not be what you think.

Let’s compare two different passwords.

A) s3!#k92kd

B) abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Which password do you think is more difficult to hack?

Well, if you guessed option B just to be cynical, you’d be right.

It turns out the length of your password is far more important than what it’s made up of.

Option A could be cracked in about 6 minutes using some of the most sophisticated methods. Option B, using the same methods, would require about 20.36 trillion centuries.

Now that being said, if you stacked a whole lot of computing power together 20.36 trillion centuries of computing time can be brought down to about 6 months, but still, that’s quite a difference!

The key is to make yourself very unattractive to those who might want to access your secure data. Like most predators, these types of people look for easy prey.

So typically, if you use long passwords and change them every 6 months or so, you should significantly increase the security of your data on the internet.

Here’s a great website to get an idea of how different passwords might hold up against cracking attempts.

Haystack Algorithm (https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm)

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