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"How many minutes or months does it take to crack your password?" Add a symbol to your password and see the difference! FREE.
Go to the Certain Key Website and enter your password and it will tell you how many days it would take to crack your password. In my work I get to know many of my clients' passwords and the vast majority are words that you can find in a dictionary. These take 0 (zero) days to crack according to CertainKey and that is just because they don't measure in seconds!
There's nothing wrong with simple, easy to remember passwords for unimportant sites etc that don't contain personal, financial or confidential information. However, if the password you're using unlocks sites or programs that contain personal information then you need to improve the quality of your passwords. This includes your email account! This is because you receive and send emails with confidential information in them and if your email account can be hacked then so can many others.
Take 'einstein' as an example of an existing password and see how making changes to it can increase the strength:
As you can see, changing some letters to capital has no appreciable effect (it may increase the time from seconds to minutes but not even 1 day). Add some numbers and it takes 500 days. BTW, don't just change 'i's to '1's and 'o's to '0's because the criminals know this trick as well! Finally, add a symbol (e.g. '@') and see it jump to 45000 days!
If you follow this advice your passwords will be secure but then they will be forgettable! Well, I have a solution for this as well. I use 'Roboform' to save, create and manage all my passwords and login information. It has one very strong password (that I have memorised) and inside it has all my passwords which vary from weak to very strong depending on the purpose. It also means that I can have different passwords for every site so if one is compromised the rest are safe. Roboform also generates strong passwords for you.
An added bonus is that if something happens to me then whomever I trust with my master password will have easy access to all my accounts and logins.
How many minutes or months does it take to crack your password? Add a symbol to your password and see the difference! FREE.
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