Picking a password is a tricky business

[Toon]

Picking a password is a tricky business. And the temptation is to go for something that is easy to remember like our partner's birthday, a pet's name, or a film star.

The trouble is, given just a few attempts it also makes it pretty easy to crack.

"Hackers today will often use a dictionary style attack. This means they can very quickly use all of the words in the dictionary as well as common celebrity or sports names," explained McAfee security analyst Greg Day.

"For example, many people still use what they think is a smart technique of switching out some of those characters for numbers, for example changing an A into a 4. But that's a very commonly known technique."

"I think what worries us more these days is we use online communities, like MySpace or Bebo, to meet and chat with other people, and people are so willing to hand over this information - favourite film star, etc. As a password stealer I only need to chat to you for a few minutes and I can probably commonly guess your password."

The ideal password is used for one site only, it uses letters in both upper and lower case, numbers, and other characters. Something like this: EAJst9s74*$D!2 - but the problem is that it is just not easy to remember.


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[Kira-Dee]

Wow i will think so hard next time

[mick_aka]

This is nothing even remotely new, it's been done this way for years.
Before allot of the security in place now brute forcers were the thing (yes I was a naughty boy back in the day) simply feed your brute forcer a downloaded list of several million passwords and leave it running whylst your out enjoying your day.
There are many security measures now preventing this, the same sort of thing that prevents spambots from opening accounts so these sort of attacks are becoming more difficult.

Sadly the young carefree days of sitting in the bottom of phoneboxes and war dialing all night long are gone forever, I wouldnt know where to start nowadays.

Importantly ALWAYS have a combination of letters AND numbers in your password.

[florin]

or if you use words maybe have them in a different weird language :)

[Joe.Morgan]

interesting read. how do you guys pick ure pws? i usally pick a song or something im really into and turn certain letters into numbers... i.e i=1 r=2 e=3 a=4 s=5 etc etc easy for me to remember but very hard for someone to work out!

[Toon]

Something like 'FLYME2THEM00N' - 10 letters and 3 numbers??

[Joe.Morgan]

or F1ym32th3m00n ;)

[Toon]

000-8A8Y. (not a song but easy to remember)

[Kelly Creative]

Why do I get the feeling this is going to start a very long thread??

[Joe.Morgan]

1 t41nk k311y c234t1v3 5h0u1d f1i2t 1ik3 th15 f20m n0w 0n