A common topic that I see in current news trends relates to the security breaches of various platforms. Whether it’s a popular web host that’s being targeted, or as we’ve seen recently in the tech oriented news; WordPress hacks, and often email account breaches. One of the most obvious and yet most overlooked points for protecting ourselves begins with the password.

In this article I won’t go over good password practices, instead I’m going to show you how easy it is for computers to algorithmically crack the password access. I hope this in turn adapts your approach to protecting your web hosting security.

5 Myths of Password Security

From www.stormpath.com – May 7, 11:55 PM

The reason has everything to do with password entropy: a representation of how much uncertainty there is in a password. This translates to how computationally difficult a password is to crack. Simply put, adding length increases entropy more efficiently than replacing letters with symbols.

Juliana Payson‘s insight:

Using people’s names, repeating characters, sequential numbers or well-known keyboard entries like `qwerty` are expected – the opposite of random. In a similar way when MySQL databases are created with auto-script installers on your web hosting control panel, the sequence of the database name and usernames are more predictable, meaning one less obstacle to crack: the password…

The Effect of Password Strength Meters | Privacy PC

From privacy-pc.com – May 7, 11:58 PM

Carnegie Mellon’s computer security and privacy expert Blase Ur presents an in-depth research of password strength meters at USENIX Security conference.

Juliana Payson‘s insight:

A dictionary check is performed against OpenWall’s mangled wordlist, which is a cracking dictionary; and if it’s in this cracking dictionary, you are told: “your password is in our dictionary of common passwords” Getting feedback from a computer algorithm on the predictability of your password is interesting but as Stormcloud from the previous article suggests; Password checkers are only as intelligent as the algorithm, so it’s useful to know what these things are based on.

Next we follow Tech Go Simple’s blog, on simple methods to fool the password generators that you can actually remember yourself…

Best ways to make memorable and secure passwords

From techgosimple.blogspot.com –Today, 12:00 AM

Follow @techgosimple on Twitter : What would happen if my password manager stopped working. Then there would be no way out such that I could get them back and all my accounts would be lost.

Juliana Payson‘s insight:

Here are some cool tips. Motor patterns are not about remembering actual passwords. Rather, you remember the pattern your fingers take when typing that password on your keyboard. Although, I have tried this before and still failed at remembering my starting point…

by – Juliana