How strong are your passwords? Test them out at Microsoft.
Think you have a few good passwords? Think they are up to snuff to ward off the hoards of attackers out there? Test them out at Microsoft’s Online Password Strength tester.
I noticed this website in a post entitled “How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords”. It’s an interesting article that shows the technical and not so technical ways to guess someone’s password and protect your own.
It also gives some very practical advice on how to choose a good memorable password that will help protect your information.
Although this information has been out there for sometime, with the amount of usernames and passwords in an average person’s digital life, the information will remain useful and valuable for quite some time.
One thing I would add to the article that I do in my daily life is have different groups of passwords. More complex and difficult passwords are used on banking and financial sites since they are *less* likely to be compromised and a different set of passwords are used for non critical sites (forums, shopping, etc) since their integrity is sometimes harder to evaluate. Ideally, you would have different passwords for everything but that’s just not practical unless you use a password manager to manage them all. Having different groups of passwords allows you to at least limit the exposure is one of your passwords or sites is compromised. If you are interested in a password manager, you should read this write up on LastPass.
It is interesting to think that your email is so critical to password security since most sites allow you to click that ‘forgot your password’ link and get a new password in the mail.
You can see how crappy your passwords are below:
Safe Computing!
– Carlo