This month, we’re going to discuss a topic that you think about every day and rarely if at all.  Sound like a puzzler that should be the basis for a riddle?  In a way, it is . . . but it’s also literally true.  You think about this every day whenever you need to access certain information such as your e-mail or data files on a network.  And yet, in many cases, this thing comes so automatically to you that you never have to give it a second thought once you have set it up—you just type it in without thinking.

If you haven’t guessed by now, we are, of course, talking about your password.  Or, in many cases, your passwords, because many of us use multiple passwords to access information on different systems in the course of a day.  Any one of those passwords is a combination of letters, numbers, and other characters which you use (most commonly in addition to a user name) to access information—in many cases, sensitive information such as personal financial records.

As always, wherever there is personal information, there will be hackers longing to get access to it.  Hackers also love to steal account names and passwords for purposes of getting access to a computer system and causing damage to it—sometimes for no other reason than just to be malicious.  These hackers will often employ very sophisticated password-breaking methods (up to and including special software programs written for just that purpose) to obtain passwords.

So if you access information that is sensitive and should not be shared with such hackers, it makes sense for you to protect it with a strong password.  A strong password is one that is very difficult for hackers to obtain even when using the tools of their trade.  We’re going to give you some tips here on how to make your passwords strong and as difficult as possible to crack.

-The longer your password, the better.  Most password-breaking software will keep generating strings of alpha-numeric characters until they hit on the one that matches your password.  With each additional letter your password contains, such software will have to generate an exponentially larger number of character strings to exhaust all the possibilities that your password could be.  Most networks/systems/providers will advise you of the minimum number of characters for your password (HunTel.net’s is four); but don’t stop at the minimum number.  A longer password is a significantly harder password to break.

-Use a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters.  This is for the same reason; hacker software will try the most obvious combinations of letters first in attempting to guess a password, and most of those combinations will be in all lowercase letters.  Using a combination makes your password more difficult to guess.

-Use numbers and special characters.  Special characters are characters such as punctuation and the symbol characters on the row of numbers at the top of your keyboard (that you get when pressing the Shift key with any of those numbers).  They help make a password stronger for the same reason that a variety of uppercase and lowercase letters do—more possible combinations for the hacker’s software to have to guess.

-If you can use a complete phrase—with spaces included—do so.  Not only is a pass phrase significantly longer than a single-word password, and therefore much harder to guess, it contains an extra character (spaces) that will make the password harder to guess for the same reasons that numbers, special characters, and different-case letters do.  The key phrase here, however, is “if you can”—not every server will accept spaces as part of a password, and some servers may react to them in unforeseen ways.  You’d be wise to check with your server’s administrator before setting this up.

-Do not use your username as your password.  This is literally the first thing that any hacker will try.

-Do not use names such as loved ones, pets, etc.  Any hacker who knows you will also try these pretty quickly.

-If using a single-word password, do not use words that can commonly be found in a dictionary.  The programs that generate random combinations in an attempt to guess passwords will key first toward recognized words.

-Do not use a string of characters that appears in sequence on your keyboard.  Believe it or not, strings such as “123456” and “qwerty” are also among the first things that hacker software will try when attempting to guess a password.

-Change your password often.  A password that changes on a regular basis will be harder to guess than a static one.

These are just a few suggestions for how to create a strong password.  If you’d like to go into even more depth, both Microsoft and Wikipedia feature excellent articles on their sites discussing strong passwords and how to create them.

It is an unfortunate truth that no password is impossible for a determined hacker to crack.  However, using some common sense and the steps here will allow you to create a password that’s close to impossible to crack and affords you peace of mind in your Internet/computing experience.

Thank you for using HunTel.net!