Agent Insights Ep 63: Strong Passwords

Hello, everyone. Flint here, to talk about how to make a strong password.

Often, when we talk about hacking, we say things like 'just make sure your password is strong, don't give it out to anyone, and don't enter it in weird places, and you don't need to worry'. This is good advice, but we haven't covered what counts as a strong password yet, so I figured it'd be a good thing to cover.

First tip is, don't make it really obvious. Having passwords like 'password' or '1234' makes it much more likely that a hacker will guess your password, as those are the first things they will try. Similarly, making it your avatar's name, your online alias, or other specific information known to be relevant to you is a bad idea, because it's easy for people to guess them. One-word passwords are also easy for people to guess. In general, if your password is super common, short, or relevant to you, don't make it your password.

To make a good password, you should make it long. The more characters a password-cracker has to deal with, the harder it'll be for it to hack your account. It's also hard to guess long passwords that are mnemonics, random numbers, or similar. If you don't have a password manager, mnemonics for sentences that you can remember are good ways to make good passwords.

Don't include actual English words. This makes it so that the bot has significantly fewer variables to consider and makes it easier to crack your password.

In general, you should be including numbers, symbols, and punctuation in your passwords. It makes it that much harder to guess when hackers need to account for them. Combining words and letters with symbols is recommended.

Don't make your passwords the same as other passwords on other sites. If a data breach happens on one, the passwords there will be added to password-crackers that brute force hacking by using bots to try many passwords in a short amount of time, and it's much more likely that other accounts that share the same password as the breached account are at risk, since the password-crackers will try the breached passwords.

Password managers are highly recommended. The passwords they generate are nigh-unbreakable, and you don't need to remember each one. I'd recommend looking them up if you're interested in having an especially strong password.

Most hackers aren't going to try to target you specifically. You are one player out of many, and the chances of you being targeted for hacking specifically are low if you aren't very famous. However, these tips apply to passwords for other things too, and it never hurts to be safe.

That's all for today. Remember to make long passwords with at least some degree of randomness to them, and of course to not share this password with anyone. Bye!