By Suzanne Kantra for Techlicious
How Long Should My Password Be?
The best way to lock something up digitally—whether it’s to keep out hackers or your kids—is to use a different, strong password for every site and situation. So when break-ins occur, like they did on LinkedIn and eHarmony in June, only information you shared with one site is in jeopardy. What constitutes a strong password, though, may not be what you think.
The usual definition of a strong password is one that has at least 8 characters (the longer the better), with a mixture of upper and lower-case letters, numbers and, if the site or service allows, special characters, such as “!,” “#” and “?.”
It turns out the biggest factor in determining the strength of your password is its length, according to a study by Carnegie Mellon. Numbers, capitalization and special characters are all bonuses, but a short password that uses all of these tricks will still be much easier to crack than a long password with real words.
So how strong are your passwords?
This excerpt appears with permission from Techlicious.
