Can you password be solved?

How secure is your password?

Are you one of those people who uses one of these most common passwords?

While looking for something online today, I came across this website – MD5 Decrypter. Wow. I never really thought about it, but I’m not surprised websites like this exist. Hackers can put your encrypted password in the form and it will be checked against a database to see if it can be “solved”.

Let me clarify this a bit. Passwords for many systems, are encrypted with the MD5 Algorithm. This algorithm can’t be de-crypted, so passwords can’t be guessed or solved that way. But the algorithm will always encrypt the same password the same way.

What this website I listed above does is houses a database of unencrypted passwords with their encrypted counterparts, so someone could enter the MD5 encrypted version of the password and it will check for a un-encrypted match in the database. So if your password is “password”, it could be solved using this website. If your password is “D%|CHW5i’^]]DB8”, then it likely won’t be solved using this password.

So what makes a good password? A good password is:

• at least 12 characters long
• uses both upper and lower case letters
• uses numbers
• uses symbols like ()!&^#*${}| etc.
• does not contain your name, your kids names, your pets name, etc.
• does not contain your birthday or anniversary, etc.
• do not use the same password that you use for other sites
• do not use a word from the dictionary
• do not use a real word from any language

Now, I know that coming up with all these strong passwords is challenging and keeping track of them can be even worse. So use a good password keeper to help you. My favorite is PassPack. I like the versatility of it – there’s a web version or a desktop version (that can be synced with each other) so you don’t need to have internet access to be able to get your passwords. It also includes a built in password generator, so you can have it help you create a different strong password each time you need a new one.

If you don’t want to use a password keeper program, here’s another method you could use – come up with a passphrase, like “My neighbor’s dog won 1st place in the last dog show!” and then turn that into a password by using the password as an acronym – “Mndw1pit<DS!”, Just like pneumonic devices that we use to remember other things, your passphrase becomes a pneumonic device to remember the password.

I’d love to hear other suggestions for creating and remembering strong passwords. What method do you use?