The Secure Password

A secure password is increasingly important: e-mail accounts, online banking, PayPal, Facebook, Ebay and Co are secured by passwords. Who knows the name of the user and the corresponding password, can in most cases easily access these services and may do something that is not in the sense of the actual owner.

Therefore, the choice of a sensible password is very important: It should not be easy to crack, and it would be nice if it is still easy to remember. In this information, I would like to address this issue and show you what you should observe and what you should not do in any case.

Creating a good password

No dictionary words or names: Never use words like "house", "mouse" or "garden" that can be found in a dictionary as a password. Also, you should never use names like "Anna" or "Benedict". Attackers can guess your password in an easy way by just trying out all the words from a dictionary or a list of names. This can be carried out with an appropriate computer program very quickly.

No standard passwords: Passwords such as "123456", "12345678", "password", "pw", "abc123", "asdfgh", "qwerty" or the like, are the most widely used passwords. But these passwords are also the most frequently hacked passwords. This is no wonder, since these passwords will also be the first that are tried out in a hacker attack. Accordingly, you should never use a password containing only characters that are next to each other on the keyboard or that are creating a pattern on the keyboard.

No passwords that can be guessed: Also, you should never take passwords, that are easy to guess. These include birth dates, names of family members, celebrities or pets, house numbers, cities, or any other terms on which you can easily come.

The length matters: This is: The longer, the better. The longer the password, the harder it is to crack. With each additional character, the possibilities of character combinations are rising and it becomes harder and harder to come by trial and error or automatic try-outs to the password. Since today's computers can crack even 6-digit passwords in a foreseeable time, at least 8 characters are recommended - the more characters, the better.

Characters to be used: The best is a combination of numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters and special characters, because also this rises the number of possible combinations of passwords immensely and that is what makes a possible attack harder. Good passwords are "Gk5%(wk!!32H&" or "2Hi(j§jKuA6!t", for example.

Easy to remember: But how can you remember such a complicated password? Again, there is a simple trick. Just remember a sentence like "Opposite to 3 large oaks, there are 6 beeches! So what?" This sentence forms the password "Ot3lo,ta6b!Sw?".

What else you should think about

Operations abroad: Do you want to use your password abroad? Then you should remember to use only characters that are also present on the corresponding keyboards. For example, umlauts, accents or other language specific characters can cause problems. The same may apply to the keyboards of smartphones, mobile phones or other input devices.

Different passwords: Never use the same password for all websites and for all services. Otherwise, in the case, someone has hacked your Ebay account, he has also access to your e-mail box and your online banking account at the same time. Especially for dubious online shops or untrustworthy forums, it makes sense to use different passwords than for reputable services. You should also use a different password for your e-mail account and the websites where you log on with your email address. Else, you hand the combination of your email address and the associated password to potential attackers on a silver platter.

Password change: Even the best password should be changed regularly. Especially if you have used the password on another PC or in an open Wi-Fi network, it may be that someone has spied out your password. After such a use, you should change your passwords in any case.

Default settings: Many devices such as mobile phones, telephone systems or routers have predefined passwords, which can be the same for all devices of the same type (for example, "000"). Change this password as soon as possible, because attackers know that many people do not change the preset data.

And remember: Even the most secure password provides no protection if it is disclosed. So, never tell anyone about your password, never leave a piece of paper with your password and never save the password in a file on your computer.

Create Passwords

Finally, we would like to recommend a tool for generating random passwords on our own behalf: The PasswordGenerator. This tool is available for Windows, macOS, Linux and Android and can also be controlled via the command line in the desktop version. In addition, it offers many optional options with which you can influence the creation of your passwords.