I am an IT person, no I am not super nerdy, no I can not hack in to somebody bank account while sat in an airport coffee lounge before leaving the country. I can build a PC, I can sort out a lot of my own problems, I can do very basic programming and scripting. The family see me as their IT guy. I try to pass on any IT info I can so earlier this week I came across this chart. Password are everywhere now a days. The membership web page to the gym to your back account, looking after your password is important.
Time of how quickly a hacker will take to brute force crack a password based on length and complexity of the password.
Hive Systems that produced this chart are a Cyber Security Company
What is Brute Force?
So what is Brute Force, well lets say your password is 6 digit long and just made up of lowercase and uppercase letters. Well the hacker has a programs that has a library of letter combinations and will start at aaaaaa, then move onto aaaaab etc. etc. That is why is is called brute force as it will go through every possible combinations. They can also get libraries of favourites names (football teams, pop stars, film stars etc.). These programs can be set to avoid combination of no more than two of the same letter in the password. So the skilled hacker will find their favourite combination of libraries and then just start attempting to crack your password. They increase their chances by using Phishing, I am not going to discuss it here but check out this web site https://www.phishing.org/what-is-phishing for more information.
Going back to the Password the more complex you can make your Password the better, look at the length (how many digits are in the password). To me and this is just my preference, if my password combination comes out in the Orange I am happy.
What can I do?
The longer and more complex the password the better, the downside is remembering it. So you have to start weighing up what is best password combination for you. Another useful tool to go with Password is two factor authentication. This is where you enter a password (say into your banking web site) and then they sent you a text message to you mobile phone with a code, which you enter on the web page and allows you to access your bank account. If you have this option for any of your password, then take it.
You can find out more information about Cyber Security from the government Cyber website https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/cyberaware/home
Having a lot of passwords you need to look after them, you could try a password manager. This is where you can store your password, so you only need to remember the password to open your password store. Have a look at https://keepass.info/ it is free and it is what I use and it will even make the password for you and rate them for strength.