The most popular and, therefore, most dangerous passwords still look like abcdef, qwerty, and 1234567… Therefore, we suggest creating a good and strong password and taking care of your data online.
An email, bank account, social media, several gaming clients, online shopping, and many other services. What do all these virtual places have in common? The fact is that when trying to use them, we need not only a fancy login (whoever has never seen the caption “A user with such a name already exists,” let him be the first to throw a stone) but also a password.
And although we live in a world where online services are playing an increasingly important role, including the ability to do official business over the net and even use medical services, the matter of a sufficiently strong password is often downplayed by us to the point that we sometimes have one and the same string of characters in many places. And to add some horror to the whole argument – often not very fancy. Because who would remember a few or even a dozen or dozens of them?
Reaed also: 6 things you can do now to keep your website secure
Fortunately, more and more websites and services require that the password meet certain criteria for its “strength,” that is, to contain not only the highest possible number of characters (a minimum of 8, sometimes even 12) but also symbols of a certain type. Some services are sufficient only for lowercase and uppercase letters, others require the addition of some kind of digit, and still others, in addition to alphanumeric characters, demand the inclusion of special characters in the password (such as !@#$%^&{><*).
It is worth knowing that strong passwords should not contain our personal information, for example, name, date of birth, names of children, parents, or other relatives. I have also encountered recommendations not to use the name of our four-legged friend or other cuddly friends for this purpose. And the strongest passwords should not contain single words at all. Hardly any known and obvious strings of characters, such as abcdef, qwerty, or 1234567, should be used. In short – nothing that can be easily remembered… The more chaotic the password – the better.
So how to create a password that is very hard to crack? Just use one of the following solutions.
How to create a secure password
Strong Password Generator
What could be simpler than installing a small password creation application on our computer? Such a solution is a Strong Password Generator from NoThankVirus. The application will take up about 2 MB on our disk. It has a very simple interface, so non-English speakers can use it.
The user can decide on the length of the password (maximum 64 characters), as well as what characters it should contain. Among them are lowercase and uppercase letters (without Polish), special characters, and numbers. In addition, we can exclude such miscellaneous hinges and characters similar to each other (e.g., oO0, il|) and prevent the same symbol from repeating one after another. After selecting the options we are interested in, we click the hard-to-miss “Generate Password(s)” button and copy the resulting string of characters to its destination. Simple? Simple!
KeePass, or (at least) two in one
The KeePass password manager is a small program that not only has the functionality of a password generator but also allows us to store all the data for the accounts we use in a single database, which – how else – is protected by a master password. This way, we are forced to remember only one password. Creating a database file is child’s play, as is adding more entries containing our login data. The database is divided by default into several categories (Internet, Banking, eMail), but we can also modify it ourselves in our own way, creating our own categories and inventories of important data.
Read also: What Are Random Numbers Generators
A password that no one will guess
Generators in the form of websites
These are probably the fastest and easiest generators, provided that we are currently connected to the network. However, let’s agree – these days, it is not difficult to do so. Typing the phrase “password generator” into a search engine, we will be inundated with suggestions of websites designed to create for us a password with the expected power. One of the items in this category is the website random.org, which allows you to create a string of characters directly in your browser.
The string of characters drawn will not be stored on any servers and will disappear as soon as you close the browser window. The site not only allows you to choose the number of characters included in the password but will also let you decide which ones you want to use. In addition, we have a preview of how many combinations the created password consists of, as well as how long it takes to crack it by running 1 million attempts per second. And so – trying to create a 12-letter password, having only numbers and lowercase letters (without Polish characters), we can find out that it will take about 150 thousand years to break it. And requiring the generator to use Polish lowercase letters will extend this time to… 2 million years, as the number of combinations will then be 68952523554931640000 (sixty-eight trillion nine hundred fifty-two billion five hundred twenty-three trillion five hundred fifty-four billion nine hundred thirty-one million six hundred forty thousand.
However, if you would prefer something even more intuitive and simple, you can reach for the site created by Avast – one of the best-known developers of antivirus software. The generator is trivial to use, and passwords are created locally on your computer.
Is my password secure?
Nowadays, we log in to certain services not only from a computer but also from a tablet or smartphone. The third option is the one we carry with us virtually always. Unfortunately, not everyone is the lucky owner of a laptop, and even if they were – surely a notebook, even in its most mobile version, will not be by our side as often as a smartphone. So why not create for ourselves a database containing the necessary passwords and logins on this very device?
A simple password database? Avast Passwords
Once again, we are dealing with a product from Avast. For a good reason – like the generator mentioned above, the mobile application is also quite simple to use. In addition to creating a database of logins and passwords, we can also catalog our payment cards here. We secure everything with one master password, or we can authenticate access by using a fingerprint reader. Simple and practical. Allowing autocomplete in apps is also an interesting option.
To add another password to the database, just use the “plus” button, enter the site address and login, and then generate (or enter an existing and used – if we determine that it is adequately secure) a password for the service. Thus prepared, we save the data … and that’s it!
The application has another quite important function – it can lock itself after 5 seconds after the screen goes blank or after 30 seconds of smartphone inactivity.
… or SafeInCloud
SafeInCloud is another very intuitive and easy-to-use app, which, even in its free version (the developers also offer a Pro version), has quite a nice array of tools, including logging into the app via a fingerprint reader (but to use this option, we have to create a master passcode for the app first anyway), and even synchronizing data with the cloud and our PC.
Leave a Reply