Make Your Passwords Uncrackable

Hacking has emerged as a serious problem in recent times and no one is safe from these online criminals. If US Military can’t protect their secret data from Chinese and Russian hackers, then how can we? The impact that these hacks have is massive and affects everyone ranging from an individual to country level.

On big scale its effect can be seen by the fact that some reports have made huge claims and said that the growth of Chinese industry is due to the hacks on American research and industries. On individual level hacks can lead to emotional as well as monetary damage. We on individual level can protect ourselves from these hacking attempts. The most important way to protect ourselves from hackers is to create a very strong password.

First, we should know about the concept of Entropy. In information theory Entropy is a measure of unpredictability of information content. As such to make a good password it should have high entropy. The problem with us, humans while generating passwords is that we never use random passwords. This weakness is used by hackers when they do dictionary attacks. And so if your password falls on the most commonly used password list then your account will definitely get hacked.

In order to prevent any pattern in your password most sites therefore advise to use special characters and numbers in your password. We have however even exploited this method and almost everyone adds numbers and special characters in the beginning or the end thus again giving rise to a pattern. So, what we must do to make a very strong password with high entropy is to prevent any pattern from rising in our passwords, when using special characters and numbers don’t add them just in the beginning or end rather add it in a random pattern and also don’t forget to see the list of most used passwords and make sure that your password isn’t in that category.