I know a lot of you are thinking, why bother about passwords? Well let me clue you in. Many passwords we use are very weak. Let me list a few and show how long it would take to break with modern computers.
- password This is in the top 5 common list of passwords used.
- pickles This is in the top 2160 common list of passwords used
- milkbad This would take 800 milliseconds because just letters and short
- mIlkBaD This would take 2 minutes because short and only letters
- m1ln2aD This would take 6 minutes. Now we have numbers and mixed letters, but too short and no symbols
- m1$k3a% This would take 1 minutes. Ops, not enough to fix the problem. Too short.
- qwerty12345asdf Wow! finally one that would take 701,000 years to brute force attack.
- qw$rty12#45as*f Adding in the symbols we get 130,000,000 years to brute force attack.
So in conclusion, it takes the following things to make a password strong.
- More than 8 characters or even more than 16 characters.
- Upper and lower case. This helps double the choices from 26 to 52.
- Add in numbers and symbols. One without the other can weaken the password.
- Finally, use a password generator and stored database like KeePass for instance.
If you wish to play around with your choices, I found this great site https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/password-strength-test/#password-test-tool .
Give it a spin and comment below on your experience. I would like to know what is the toughest password using the above tool?
Anyone up to the challenge. Oh a password generator does not count! 
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