







4



186 Shares

Many people are unaware that easily putting a password on something does not make it all that safe, especially as lots of commonly used passwords, are about as secure as a screen door in a hurricane I mean obviously passwords like QWERTY or 1234 and the name of your favourite sports team are horrible choices because they’re incredibly easy to guess.

But if you pick something that’s obscure and difficult for someone who doesn’t know you well too divine does that necessarily even mean that safe well that all depends on the way passwords are stored. Secure websites hash your password meaning that it is passed through an algorithm that is extremely difficult to reverse with the output being what’s stored on the server, the problem though is that because many sites use the same algorithm such as the one in the commonly used SHA series. An attacker can run lots of common and or short passwords through the hash quickly and then compare that to hashed passwords stored on a server to see if any of them match and even though this can be prevented using a technique called salting which adds a random numerical string to your password before running it through a hash.

While length is probably the most important variable, the best thing to do is to use long passwords made up of random characters including symbols, but how you will remember a huge password with a bunch of pound signs and colons in it. Well there are quite a few password managers out there that not only store and autofill your passwords, but also generate pseudo-random passwords quickly, so you can use a different one for every site, just make sure that whichever password manager that you’re using stores all your passwords with heavy encryption