Aunty Acid by Ged Backland for May 03, 2021

That’s why I have to keep referring to my cheat sheet.

I use Milk of Amnesia all the time.

Mine are protected by amnesia because of all the rules to create one.

At least 8 characters long, at least one upper case letter, at least one lower case letter, at least one number, at least one special character, NO EMOJIs

A good password has three attributes: it’s long, it’s difficult to guess and it is easy to remember.

Notice that I did not mention that it needed a mix of upper case, lower case, some punctuation but not others and cuneiform characters. Nor did I mention that you have to change it twice a day.

Hackers have a database of the most commonly used million or so passwords. Mostly these are dictionary words with some modifications like adding 123 or @ for A and 3 for E.

If you are using one of these, then they’ll hack you in under a minute. Otherwise, they can use brute force. There are 26 letters (upper case an lower case) and 10 numbers (with associated punctuation) for a total of 72 characters. The hacker has to try every possible combination.

Assuming that the $illy @ss rules of the site allow all these characters each time another character is added to the password, the amount of time it takes to crack is multiplied by 72.

I think that passwords should be longer than 10 characters. Most of mine are over 20.

One of my former passwords (I still remember it after 20 years) was baseball_Ruth_60HR_1927. Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in 1927.

There are programs on line that evaluate the strength of passwords. According to one, the Ruth password would take 16 septillion years to crack. That’s 16 with 24 zeros following it. The universe hasn’t been around that long.

Even the password Ten_Letters (which is 10 characters) takes 96 years to crack

You don’t have to be that good. Most hackers are going after low hanging fruit and will abandon the attempt if it’s taking more than a minute to hack. Now if your name is Amazon, Bank of America, IRS or NSA, you might want to have a passwords that takes a septillion or two years to crack.

Don’t think in terms of pass WORDS, think in terms of pass PHRASES. If you are a sports nut, use statistics; history buff, use events and dates ; like to cook? use part of a recipe.

My apologies. Ten-Letters is 11 characters long and here is how long it takes to crack, letter by letter. Notice how rapidly the time to crack goes up as you add letters.

T 1 – 600 picoseconds

e 2 – 67 nanoseconds

n 3 – 3 micorseconds

_ 4 – 500 micorseconds

L 5 – 33 milliseconds

e 6 – 2 seconds

t 7 – 2 minutes

t 8 – 2 hours

e 9 – 1 week

r 10 – 1 year

s 11 – 96 years

Two seconds! Think about that when companies recommend that the minimum size of a password should be 6 characters. Two additional characters would probably put your password in the “stop wasting my time and move on” category for most hackers.

There are programs known as Password Managers that can remember passwords for you. I use Last Pass. It is protected by a password that takes over an octillion years to crack.

It’s long, it’s easy for me to remember but I do admit, it takes a while to type.

Mine, too. I always have to reset and the sites won’t let me re-use (not frequently visited), just create new so I continue to forget . Frustrating.

Only the Russian hackers have it.

i have so many different passwords written down on pieces of paper that i keep in a folder. i keep saying i am going to put them all down on a couple sheets of paper to make them easier to lookup but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

AT&T let’s me have 2 weeks at a time, then tells me the password in wrong again. I WROTE THE DAMNED THING DOWN !

Personally, I have Never written a Password on the bottom of my keyboard.

I can’t type while I’m holding the thing upside down.