Reading “Passwords Under Assault” by Dan Goodin was a little frightening.  It turns out that many people are facing problems on their private sites due to hacking.  Hacking has become a huge threat to users on the Internet, leaving most of us vulnerable to it’s risks.

A point that was brought up many times in the article was that so many people reuse certain passwords for more that one site at a time.  Goodin mentioned that the average Web user maintains 25 separate accounts but uses just 6.5 passwords to protect them, according to a landmark study (PDF) from 2007.  Those numbers seem about right to me, considering I am also guilty of being one of these people.  The password I use for Facebook, I also use on Twitter, my back account, email, and various other sites.  After reading the article and as I write this post, I think to myself that I might as well go ahead and display my password on here because it seems as if it wouldn’t be very difficult for a hacker or you to obtain it yourselves.

According to the article, some of the methods of creating passwords I once thought were safe are not so safe after all.  I had heard that writing out a word and then writing the same word backwards (pantsstnap) was a good way to throw the hackers off, but it turns out that most of the time their creepy ideologies can see past tricks like that.

I’ve learned that creating sentences is a smart way to go about making a strong password.   Sentences are difficult for hackers to decode because it could be a variation of many different words.  If there is a character limit on the password, the first letter of the first word in the sentence can make up the password.  Another useful trick is the use of punctuation. Punctuation makes a code extremely strong.  Adding a “!” to a word or sentence makes it more difficult to crack.

Now that I know the difference between weak and strong passwords, I definitely have to reevaluate my password construction.  I’ll surely be changing a lot of passwords in the near future.