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How safe is your password?

THE SCANDAL of phone hacking made me wonder how easy it would be to guess the passwords we use on a computer or smart phone.

According to The Independent on 20th July, “we are spectacularly unimaginative in our choice of passwords”. Security expert Mark Burnett says that 98.8 per cent of us share the same 10,000 passwords.

Some of you reading this article will look at this list of common computer passwords and recognise their own: ‘password’, ‘123456’, ‘12345678’, ‘qwerty’ and ‘1234’. Popular ones for a smart phone are: ‘1234’, ‘0000’, ‘2580’, ‘1111’ and ‘5555’.

Burnett, author of Perfect Password, says that the common advice we’re given, particularly to mix letters and numbers, as ‘pass123’ does, just isn’t enough. He emphasises, “we should be concentrating on making them longer”. If your password has15 characters or more then it no longer matters how random it is.

The reason is to do with how passwords are compromised. One way is for someone to ask you what it is, perhaps by a scam email that claims to be from your bank. The second approach is to guess — remember, 99% of us share the same 10,000 passwords. Thirdly, with a fast computer and the right software, an eight character password can be solved in a couple of hours. Extend that to 12 characters and it would take centuries to work out.

So, wherever possible, the answer is to choose a password longer than 12 characters; if you are free to choose whatever you like, go for 15.

An easy way to come up with a long password is to choose the initial letters of a memorable two-sentence phrase, such as iatwattatlnocttfetm — “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”. You can add memorable numbers between the sentences—iatwattatl146nocttfetm—then finish it off with a symbol or two, “iatwattatl146nocttfetm”.

Start typing this into Microsoft’s password checker to see what I mean: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/security/pc-security/password-checker.aspx.

Microsoft advises against using

dictionary words in any language; words spelled backwards, common misspellings and abbreviations;
sequences of repeated characters or adjacent letters on your keyboard; or personal information such as name, birthday, passport number etc.   As a first step, just make your password much longer… and don’t, for any reason, disclose it to anyone.

Gordon Wilkinson