Having a strong password
We use passwords everyday, when we want to read emails, login to MSN Messenger, post in a web forum or a blog and many other password protected systems, if you're online a lot then I bet you have at least four places you go to that needs a password.

The idea of having a password is to protect your information or your account that is solely used by you, and that is very important, to make sure that you protect your information.

Using an easy password can jeopardise your account, a lot of people use their birth date, phone number, or even their real name as passwords, and that is a big mistake because anyone that knows you can probably guess that password.

Your password should not reflect or be similar to any information available to public audience, if you have trouble remembering a complex formatted password, then just play with the letters and numbers.

For example, let's say that your name is "John Smith", if you're password is just "johnsmith" that means any of your friends can guess that password, or if a hacker with a bit of patience can brute force it.

If you use a mutli character password then you just gradually decreased the possibility of a friend gussing your password or hacker decrypting it, if we turn "John Smith" to "JOHn+smiTH!" then you just made the job very hard on both your friends and the hacker.

Passwords are case sensitive, meaning that "man" is different than "MAn" that simple switch from only lower case to a mix of lower and upper case makes the password very strong, let me elaborate, here are the possibilities of a multi character password:

• abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
• ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
• 0123456789

The possibilities of that are endless, the longer your password and the more complex it is then you virtually made it impossible for anyone to hack or guess that password, unless the password is being saved as basic text without encryption, most password protected systems use encryptions such as MD5 or SHA1 or even both.

If a hacker tries to brute force your password, he first has to figure out how many characters you're using, let's say four, if you use a complex pass, here is a 0.00001% of the list he has to go through before remotely coming close to the password:

• aaaa
• aaab
• aaac
• So on and so forth...

Keep in mind the list above only shows the lower case, the hacker will have to check all, lower, upper, numbers, symbols..etc, which can take centuries to figure out! a well developed password system also has even more complications to better protect you such as "salted passwords" or let's say using a specific "key" but you don't have to worry about that, just feel better that there are people out there trying to make the online world safer for you.

Just remember to always make your password hard to guess, use a complex format and if you're having problems thinking of one, you can always use our Password Generator page to make one.

Article by: WGTools.com