Why you should choose strong passwords

Intro

Why is everything so hard? why can’t I just use one password rule them all, One Password to find them all, One Password to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them, with an apology to J.R.R.Tolkien. So, this leads us to an important question we should ask ourselves which is ‘why you should choose strong passwords?’.

The Brute-Force attack

One of the oldest attacks in history would be something called the Brute-Force attack, which is based on a guessing concept. In other words, if my password is two numbers then if someone wants to hack me, how many times would he have to guess?

That’s correct!

Where 10 is the total number from 0 to 9 and 2 is the number of characters in the password.

What does that mean?

If your password contains characters and numbers, the length of your password is 8 then the number of guessing would be:

The total number of English characters (26) + total number of numerical characters (10) = 36 to the power 8 => 2821109907456 try.

One password to rule them all

So, when you generate a more complex password it means you are expanding the odds. You make it harder for the hacker to guess, and it takes more time and effort, and computing power.

A good password would be 12 characters in length. Uppercase (26) + Lower case (26) + Numbers (10), and special chars (33).

Are you getting the idea? you do the math

So, why not make one strong password for all of your accounts?

That’s a good question, because if the website’s database was compromised then you are exposed. Some might say but the password is salted or hashed but my answer to this is rainbow tables.

By that, I mean that passwords do not get stored in a straight string. Instead, we encrypt it by a hashing algorithm like Blowfish or any good hashing algorithm and store it in the database encrypted.

But even though it’s still a major security issue.

Because Hackers would use something called Rainbow tables, which is a large set of string passwords with their hash. So, they make a comparison and bingo.

One Password to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them

How to protect my accounts from being compromised and use one password?

There are several solutions to this issue:

The first good solution for this is to sync all your data to Google. Your email’s password should be unique and very strong but that’s all. You will remember one password and sync all others to google cloud.

Another good solution would be the LastPassword plugin which is a plugin to handle all your passwords. One more thing to mention in this is that you have to remember your password. They don’t store your one password in the server to enhance security so if you lost it you will not be able to recover and you will lose all your data.

Summary

Passwords should not be the same, they should be strong, they should have a combination of special characters, upper/lower case, and numbers. If you worried about your security you should take care of these little things for your own safety.