From The Financial Post:
You may think that your online information is safe but in reality, it’s only as safe as the password you use.
That handful of characters is all that stands between an online criminal and the contents of your eBay, Amazon or online banking account. How can you make sure that it doesn’t get compromised?
Short passwords are possibly the worst kind to use, because they are relatively easy to crack in what security experts call a brute force attack.
Even the most basic modern desktop computers have enough processing power to guess passwords simply by trying different combinations of letters repeatedly. The fewer letters there are in a word, the more likely it is to be cracked.
Using real words (rather than random collections of letters and numbers that don’t mean anything) is also dangerous. Software exists that uses ‘dictionary attacks’ against passwords, running through hundreds of thousands of words in the English language on the assumption that people want to use a word they will remember.
Somehow, ‘8uiklg5ybs’ just doesn’t stick in a person’s memory, whereas the name of their pet does.
[tags]Passwords, Password Security, User Education[/tags]