Wednesday, February 03, 2021

Advice On Choosing a Password

I'm sure no one reading this blog is using "monkey123" or "password" as a password on anything that has an internet connection. If you are, you are likely owned by  some script kiddie in Estonia. Maybe you are using a password that looks more secure, like "c@b1eC4BL3". That one might not be so good, as this article shows.

The article points out seven common mistakes that people make when choosing passwords. A couple of them are not obvious, so it's worth taking the time to read and think about what you're using for passwords – unless, of course, you're using a password manager. 

People who work to break passwords know that people like doing this, so if someone tries to break into your accounts, they're going to try all these substitutions anyway. This reinforces the idea that you should strive to make your password topology---meaning the pattern that your password uses---as random as possible.

For instance, a common password topology for an eight-character password would be an uppercase letter, followed by five lowercase letters, and finally two digits. The password Daniel87 falls under this common topology. While it's still not particularly strong since it uses a name, switching this to dan8iEl7 would be better, as it's not a predictable topolog

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