12 Mar How to Create Strong Passwords
Worried about your website getting hacked? Here’s the quickest way to test and create strong passwords.
Hi, folks. Paul Barrs here. Let’s do a quick video in creating strong passwords. There are certain areas of the website such as your administrative login area, your control panel and others, even you’re e-mail addresses, that really do require strong passwords. What I have here are some sample passwords that I’ve seen people use and I’m going to give you some more ideas, such as this one, mypassword, just some basic letters.
I’m going to put this into this tool called “how secure is my password.” Shift insert. It would take about 59 minutes for a computer bot to crack that password. Not very long and that’s actually a slow computer bot, but not very long at all.
What if I took the next one and just use “password” for example or a word, 34, a number. A word and a small number. About a day, not much better. Here’s the thing, you might think, “Well, no one is going to spend a day working on trying to crack my password.” You’re right, they won’t. These are apps and programs that run in the background and continually trying to hack your system.
Now, I have something a little more complex. We have a hashtag, a symbol, we have some letters, then we have some numbers all mixed in together. Five years. Now, we’re starting to get somewhere. So these are the types of password that I recommend you use. You’re probably thinking, “But Paul, I have so many of them. How could I possibly remember them?” Well, you don’t need to. There are services out there like LastPass where you need to remember only one solid password and you can access everything from there. But I suggest you just keep a file for the most important things. And this is what I do, I keep just a standard file, print it as well as saved on the computer somewhere, not called passwords, obviously. And it keeps those most important ones there.
What I’d like you to do is go now over to Strong Password Generator and click and generate some passwords. Now, we do have some options. In these options, I like to take advantage of them. I keep the length at 15. I then include punctuation, but I avoid programming punctuation and I avoid similar characters, and then generate a new password. Now, let me just grab this one here. It’s the first one that came off the list. Have a look at it. I’ll see if I like it. Yep, that’s fine.
Now, here’s what I like about this one, if a customer rang me up and said, “Paul, can you read that password to me?” I’d rather e-mail it to you, but I could actually read it to you whereas if I had something here like a one, well, sometimes on some screens particularly small devices that might seem like an “L” or an upper case, “I.” So I would never use that, but that I can do or some other combination. Let’s have a look and see how long it will take to crack a password like this. It’s not going to happen, very, very rarely.
Now, no password is 1,000% secure. I guess if the NSA was looking at your stuff they could find a way around here, but the average computer hacker can’t. And that’s why it’s important that you find and make sure you are using strong passwords at least, at least for me, please for your control panel, the C Panel password I give you will be strong and then also for your website login admin areas. Because they’re the areas if someone hacks I’ve got to fix. I’d rather it didn’t happen. Thanks very much, there’s a bit of homework for you.
