How Strong Are Your Passwords?
Everyone has a different scheme for creating passwords. Perhaps it's your favorite book titles, strings of random characters that make sense to you, or your children's names. Ideally, your scheme follows recognized best practices: using a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols, having more than seven characters, not using easy-to-guess words, and never using the same password twice. Myself, I'm becoming a huge fan of SafePasswd, because it means that I get closer to following these recommendations without having to come up with any passwords on my own.
But even if you employ these best practices, do you know how strong your passwords is? Or for those weak passwords that you just never get around to changing, do you know how quickly they can be cracked? To find out, try Hackosis' Brute Force Calculator. Enter how many upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters that you have in your password, and it will tell you how long it will take to crack your password. The results might surprise you. - K
