Orange County, CA - I just read a summary of research on secure passwords vs. weak ones that get hacked. If you are looking to create your own secret password or if you are a network administrator looking to enforce secure password policy then read on. These results are from a study on 10 million passwords that have been breached in recent years.
In summary, if you want a weak password, then use:
- Words
- Names
- Verbs
- Colors
- Animals
- Fruits
- “Love” phrases
- Superheroes
- And days of the week
- Leet speak, the act of using informal language or code in which standard letters are often replaced by numerals or special characters such as “n00b” or “gue55able”
- Most importantly, don’t use patterns on your keyboard or phone dialer pad. Those are at the very top of the list of quickly decoded passwords.
Easily broken passwords that fit the above criteria were broken by password crackers in anywhere from 10 to 32 seconds, these are passwords like “s3ash311” (seashell) broken in 15.6 seconds, “Indiana” in 9.8 seconds and “123456” in 0 seconds. Password crackers can test up to 300,000 passwords per second. Conversely a password like “cba75c2d4 took four days and “ns8vfpobzmx098f4coj” would take centuries.
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