This is common knowledge; you should use a combination of alphabets, numerical digits, and special characters (!, @) to create strong passwords. Yet, the most commonly used password on the Internet is 123456 followed by 12345 – see full list.
The following visualization courtesy CXO categorizes some of the popular passwords based on their strength – it might appear a little funny but lot of people are actually using such simple, easy-to-guess passwords for their online accounts.
How Strong is your Password?
Online services like Google’s Gmail or WordPress have password meters that calculate the strength of password as you type more characters into the box. Microsoft too offers an online tool that will instantly tell if your password is strong or weak.
There’s however one downside with most of these password checking tools – they’ll tell you that your password is weak (and thus easy to crack) but you won’t know why the password string has been labeled weak and what you can do to strengthen it.
Enter Password Meter – this is an online tool that will not only rate your password’s strength but will offer clues on what you kind of characters can you add or remove to improve the password’s strength. For instance, the complexity of password “Hell@Wor1d!” can be improved by removing consecutive lowercase letters.
Related: Choose a Safe Password Manager
Find this article at: http://labnol.org/?p=12751
Reader Comments
deathknight55 is not strong.. it might be reported as strong since it contains both letters and numbers..
Most brute-force-applications out there usually use a word-list that it uses when testing passwords and combining words and adding numbers..
Even replacing “i” with the number “1″ and such are also usually easy to crack..
If you want a strong password that’s easy to remember there is one simple way to do it.
Pick some frase you use quite often or that’s easy for you to remember. Maybe “I like my coffee with milk and sugar” or something like that.. take the first letter in every word and you will end up with “Ilmcwmas” and somewhere in the middle of that string add a number (year you where born/street-number of the office) “Ilmcw436mas” and then add one or 2 other character to this and you will end up with “Il@mcw436mas.”. Doing this all you have to remember is the sentance and what position you add the special char at and the number/numbers you chosen..
This way you will have a easy to remember password that’s very strong against plain bruteforce-attempts.
Written by pa on 02.17.10
After reading your article I tested some password candidates in the password meter and also other sites like the micro-soft one;the scores are not comparable!what is declared strong in one scores poorly in another;however your article has highlighted the need to improve our passwords as password hacking seems to have come of age in our country.thanks .
RKRAO
Written by RKRAO on 02.18.10
This service can be misused too, if everyone checks their passwords, then very well, they can collect all these passwords and put it in their password dictionary and then release a DVD like rainbow table and start hacking.
Written by Ramkumar on 02.19.10