We all know that we need to have strong passwords to protect our company and private information. What you may not know is you can test your current passwords and see exactly how strong they actually are.

Thanks to the website “Passfault” you can enter your password and it will calculate how secure it is, by determining how long it would take to be cracked.

 

You can test your own passwords at www.passfault.com

 

Without getting all technical, Passfault identifies patterns in your password, and then calculates the number of passwords that could exist in those patterns. From that information it will determine

 

    1. The time it would take to crack
    2. Total passwords in the pattern

 

I was pleased to see that our company administration password returned a result of Time to crack: two decades, eight years and Total Passwords in pattern or 534 trillion.

 

However my personal banking password retuned a result of Time to crack: four days and total passwords in pattern 337 billion. Needless to say I’ve strengthened it.

 

There are some rules you can follow to create strong passwords:

 

    1. Don’t use the same password for all your various accounts.
    2. Make them long, at minimum 8 characters longer the better.
    3. Don’t use actual words; make up a base word from series of letters from a phrase or something you can easily remember.
    4. Ad upper and lower case letters, to the base phrase.
    5. Ad numbers and symbols to the base phrase.

 

For example: Our first family pet was a Kelpie / Poodle cross named Sooty. So my base phrase could be: offpwakpxns

The house where I grew up was number 22 and I have one sister. So I can add that to the base phrase and it becomes; offpwakpxns221

 

I can then further strengthen this, by switching between upper and lower case letters and adding symbols, so it becomes OffPwaKPxns#22-1.

 

You can use the same or similar base words to help you remember your passwords for example OffPwaKPxns#22-1 could become #22-1sWtnoOffPaKPx being my house number, number of sisters and then Sooty was the name of our first family pet a Kelpie Poodle cross.

 

For the record if OffPwaKPxns#22-1 was my password, according to Passfault it has a Time to crack of 48364912429013270 centuries and 146 Nonillion total passwords in pattern.