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The digital key for your online locker is not like physical key, which is hard to grab and duplicate. Whatever be your password, it can be copied out, no matter how long it is.

If you think your password is strong enough, and use the same everywhere, it is not a good practice. Cyber criminals steal passwords on websites that have very little security, and then they use that same password and user name in more secure environments, such as banking websites.

These are general guidelines, but you should not be casual while creating a password. Some sites provide you the strongness meter while typing, but not all. Desktop software lack in this.

Comparitech has an online password checker tool, that tell you its strength and how much time approximately a computer would take to crack it. Depending on the complexity of password, it might be matter of nanoseconds, seconds, minutes or years. The tool is available under Privacy security tools.

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Password strength is determined using several signals. These may be

  • Complexity of different characters used.
  • String length.
  • Occurrence in dictionary.
  • Any sequences or general set of characters like 1234, QWERTY, asdfgh.
  • A calendar date.
  • Common words like admin, pass, pass123, etc.

Try a combination of them to have a great key. It may save you when you have no other way then to type the password in front of friends.

Post tagged in: MicrosoftSecurity