Your passwords may not be very secure, even if you think they are. Find out how you can create robust passwords

Everyone has to keep track of dozens of passwords: for network accounts, online services, premium websites, ATMs or credit cards. It’s difficult to remember all of them, so some write their passwords on a piece of paper, leaving their accounts vulnerable to thieves or in-house snoops. Others choose the same password for different applications which makes life easy for intruders of all kinds. According to a recent survey, nearly 50% of users have the same password for all the sites they visit on the Internet. Moreover, almost 90% of them don’t change their password periodically. Imagine what would happen if any of your accounts were to be hacked; the hacker would gain access to all your email, bank and social networking accounts and may even wipe out your presence from the Internet!
Just for a scare, try this: search your email for some of your own passwords. Most probably, you will find a lot of your own passwords, either because you have emailed them to yourself or because some websites email your password when you register or when you click on the ‘I forgot my password’ link. So, if a hacker manages to access your email, he can easily break into your other accounts.

You can prevent this from happening by creating passwords that are difficult to crack. Unfortunately, increasingly sophisticated technology, coupled with our own carelessness, may render even supposedly ‘robust’ passwords vulnerable to attack by an experienced hacker.

So, how can you create a truly secure password? Although no password can be 100% secure, you should use a combination of words, digits and special characters to create a password that will be difficult to crack. It’s also important to be aware of the methods used by hackers to crack a password.

According to Eric Thompson, founder of AccessData (a technology forensics company that helps detect and investigate cases of fraudulent data access), most passwords follow a pattern. (In fact, AccessData has developed a ‘password-guessing’ software). He says that people, typically, choose a readable word as the base for a password—it may be a word that is pronounceable in English but not included in a dictionary. When pressed to add a numeral or symbol to make the password more secure, most people add ‘1’ or ‘!’ to the end of that word.

AccessData’s software, which uses a ‘brute force’ technique that tries thousands of passwords until it guesses yours correctly, can easily figure out such common passwords. When it incorporates your computer’s web history into its algorithm—including all your information on Twitter, Facebook and other such sites—AccessData’s software can come up with a list of passwords that is highly likely to include yours as well.

AccessData’s research found that a typical password consists of a root word plus an appendage. The appendage is a suffix to the root word in 90% of the cases.
The first operation of the AccessData software is to test a dictionary of about 1,000 common passwords, like ‘letmein’, ‘password1’, ‘123456’ and so on. Then, it tests each of these words with about 100 common suffix appendages, like ‘1’, ‘4u’, ‘69’, ‘abc’, ‘!’ and so on. Believe it or not, the software recovers about 24% of all passwords with these 100,000 combinations.

Then, the software scans a series of increasingly complex ‘root dictionaries’ and ‘appendage dictionaries’. The ‘root dictionaries’ include a common word dictionary (5,000 entries); names dictionary (10,000 entries); comprehensive dictionary (100,000 entries); and phonetic pattern dictionary (1/10,000 of an exhaustive character search).

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