How to create better / stronger and super passwords ??
Most of our financial and personal data is now getting online. Only thing that secures the data from a thief is a simple thing called “password”. Over the years with ever rising hardware power, this simple thing aint simple anymore. Hackers are now days cracking simple passwords with ease, so the question a common web user always face is how to chose a better and stronger password ??
Researchers of “Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science” suggest two simple methods to choose your password.
The single best method for generating passwords is to do the following:
Make up a sentence you can easily remember. Some examples:
I have two kids: Jack and Jill.
I like to eat Dave & Andy’s ice cream.
No, the capital of Wisconsin isn’t Cheeseopolis!
Now take the first letter of every word in the sentence, and include the punctuation. You can throw in extra punctuation, or turn numbers into digits for variety. The above sentences would become:
Ih2k:JaJ.
IlteD&A’ic.
N,tcoWi’C!
As you can see, the passwords generated by this method can be fairly secure, but are easy to remember if the sentence you pick is one that is easy for you to remember.
Please don’t use one of the sentences above to generate your password.
Another password selection method
If you don’t wish to use the above method, the following method also generates “reasonably secure” passwords (though not quite as good as the method above) that may be easier to remember:
Choose two unrelated words such as:
unix & fun
book & goat
august & brick
Join the words with a non-alphabetic character or two.
Make at least one change (for example, uppercase a letter or add another character) to one of the words (preferably not just at the very beginning or end of the password).
Some example passwords generated using this method:
unix+fUn
bo!ok29goat
august,=bRICK
Please don’t use one of the passwords above.
Why do we need super password ?
Threat is getting high every single day. A research by “Georgia Institute of Technology” shows, how easy it is getting for a hacker of password cracker to use bruit force method with ever increasing processing power.
Designed to handle the ever-growing demands of computer games, today’s top GPUs can process information at the rate of nearly two teraflops (a teraflop is a trillion floating-point operations per second). To put that in perspective, in the year 2000 the world’s fastest supercomputer, a cluster of linked machines costing $110 million, operated at slightly more than seven teraflops.
With Nividia or ATI SDK (Software Development Kit) available for free and desktop computer allowing running multiple GPU with technology called SLi (Nvidia) or CrossFire (ATI), an attacker can have a super computer type power available in his desktop to use it for bruit force.
It is extremely important that we start taking care about our online security and develop our own super passwords.