Give me your password.

Unless you are a Kardashian, you value privacy. No one wants their online accounts hacked and their innermost secrets thrown out in public, right? Kiss your hard-earned reputation goodbye! 

But with hackers becoming more sophisticated, the best defense is still having a good and reliable password for protection. Meaning, it must be hard-to-crack. 

In 2009, Rockyou (a social gaming site) experienced a coordinated hacking attack. Apparently, the hackers had an easy time decoding the passwords of the RockYou gamers. Why? Because more than 29,000 accounts were using the password “123456” - the most popular password - while some even used “password” as their password. And you ask why gamers are stereotyped?

So how do we avoid bad password:

Firstly, don’t use any part of your name and address, including your birthday, pet names or anything else that could be public knowledge because these information are easily obtained about you. Do not use consecutive numbers nor words in the dictionary too. These are extremely easy for a cracking program to decode.

According to Imperva Application Defense Center, for best passwords use Uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. Hackers use a technique called a “brute force attack.” Statistically speaking, your password is harder to decode because the automated computer software would have to guess every possible combination to crack your personal code. 

For example, m00se44 might be faster to type, but m00se44!.!.!.! is a far safer bet. How much safer? According to a handy online brute force simulator, m00se44 can be cracked in less than a second but m00se44!.!.!.! will take the same software almost 200,000 centuries to crack it.

To make passwords more secure:

1. Add letters: Since there are 26 letters in the alphabet, one additional letter can make your password 26 times harder to crack.

2. Use a mix of lower and uppercase letters: Mixing up your cases adds complexity and safety to your chosen password.

3. Add numbers: Using letters, words, and phrases for your passwords seems both natural and easy to remember, but it’s much safer to diversify.

4. Add symbols: Symbols are the real secret ingredient to security. Since there are over 1500 symbols a hacking program needs to run through to correctly lock down one character of your password, adding one extra asterisk or exclamation point can make it 1500 times more difficult for intruders to pry open your personal accounts.

5. Password length = Password strength : If you can enter 14 characters, don’t stop at 10 — those extra 4 characters will work to your statistical advantage.

Have a safe online experience everyone!