Passwords are what keep your email, files and other computer resources out of the hands of others. Choosing a good password is key for users of a secure system. This does not only makes your own information secure, it also makes the system more secure as a whole. One breakable link in the chain is all a hacker needs to gain access to a system.

Some methods for picking good passwords:

Combine two words together that include of seven characters (this can be longer up to the length your system permits) and that has no connection to each other. Combine them with a punctuation mark in the middle and convert some characters to uppercase.

Examples:

• 0nE+pEn (first character is zero)
• sNow#you

Use the first characters of the words of a certain (not too common) sentence. When we use the sentence "My cats are called Tom and Jerry!" as an example, we would get the password "McacTaJ!" (Also in this case make sure you use an eight-character password with uppercase characters and/or punctuation marks.

What is not secure?

There are password cracker programs out there. These programs generally try to enter words in the given dictionary to find the password. When you search on the Internet with "Password Cracker" or "password hack", you will find lots of ways and programs that crack the password of the specific e-mail or system. Your password should not be in any dictionary in any language. It should not be a geographic name or patterns like 12345, qwerty, etc. The license plate of a car, room number, or something to do with the owner of the account is examples of bad-chosen passwords. It should be typed quickly, so somebody cannot follow what you type by looking over your shoulder.

Common Passwords:

An anonymous hacker says "system operators generally prefer God; arrogance is a weakness. And older ladies tend to use the names of pets or grandchildren." Now on a more serious side, let’s see how we welcome hackers to hack us. By the way, "welcome" is a common password used by most of the web-hosting clients.

Here is the list of passwords that has been most entered: love, sex, god, secret, default, unknown, aaa, abc, academia, academic, access, ada, admin, aerobics, airplane, albany, alf, algebra, alias, aliases, alpha, alphabet, amber, amorphous, analog, anchor, andromache, animals, anita, answer, anthropogenic, anything, april, aria, arrow, athena, atmosphere, aztecs, banana, bandit, banks, bart, bartman, basic, batman, beauty, wizard, work, whatever, visitor, unix, sysadmin, super, student, somebody, password, soap, smile, singer, signature, rolex, professor, pencil, paper, papers, operator, office, nobody, master, manager, guitar, golf, games, ferrari, coke, cigar, etc.

If you download a password cracker from Internet and want to try it, you need a list of these common passwords. Search "common-passwords.txt" on the search engines. Fourty percent of all account’s passwords that I have been trying are common passwords, and it takes only 3 minutes to crack it. Now, you know how easy to get into somebody’s account. I am sure you understood the importance of passwords and what a good password means.