I wrote 'What's You're Go-to Password' last year and just last week I came across another article on password management. If you use a weak password or have a Go-To password then you need to read this article on how this guy would hack your password. Tell your friends and family as well. The author does a very good job of explaining how a typical hacker may go about cracking your password, examples of how to make your passwords better, and a nice little chart to show just how fast a typical password can be cracked.
This is a real problem. Gone are the days where you can have one password and use it for all of your online activity. Or, as the author pointed out, use a weak password for your unsecure sites (email) that actually lead to breaches into your secure sites (online banking) . Based on a chart in the article, he says:
Pay particular attention to the difference between using only lowercase characters and using all possible characters (uppercase, lowercase, and special characters - like @#$%^&*). Adding just one capital letter and one asterisk would change the processing time for an 8 character password from 2.4 days to 2.1 centuries.
Whose going to take 2.4 days to work on your password? If it's all automated then it doesn't really matter (he give links to tools that can do this). How do you keep track of all of these difficult passwords? Yep, he recommends Roboform! I'm telling you, it will be the best $29 dollars you'll spend on internet security. I've been using it for over 2 years now and I've got my wife on it as well.
Giddy Up!