Password Puzzles

Are you the type of person who uses the same 5 letter password for all your accounts? Or the type to just use the first 6 letters of the alphabet, or even your keyboard? Or perhaps your name plus birth year? Or perhaps something with sentimental value, like maybe your pet's name (e.g. Blackie, Doggy, Mingming etc.)? Bloomberg Businessweek recently came up with password problem statistics that will alarm even the most apathetic among us:

Most-used passwords: 123456, password, 12345678, qwerty, abc123

Time it takes a hacker's computer to randomly guess your password:

image from bookofjoe

See the table above and check if your password is susceptible to brute force attacks. Not sure what this is exactly? Wikipedia provides a great definition:

In cryptography, a brute force attack or exhaustive key search is a strategy that can in theory be used against any encrypted data by an attacker who is unable to take advantage of any weakness in an encryption system that would otherwise make his task easier. It involves systematically checking all possible keys until the correct key is found. In the worst case, this would involve traversing the entire search space.

Of course, there are countermeasures. As the old adage goes: "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." So here are some tips to prevent being being victimized by hackers:

1. 9-digit passwords or higher are harder to crack. The resources required for a brute force attack scale exponentially with increasing key size. Unless, of course, you decide on 123456789.

2. Keep your email password safe and secure. Most sites send passwords back to your email, so once this is breached, consider nothing safe. NOTHING!

3. Use KeePass Password Safe. It's a free, open source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager that is generally resistant to password-cracking utilities.