“One of the easiest ways to give yourself a strong password would be using a full sentence,” said Kurt Muhl of RedTeam Security. The cyber security firm based in St. Paul comprises of white hat hackers which helps various companies to discover security flaws before the hackers exploit them. Using a full sentence actually means that think a phrase which you use everyday that you can easily remember such as “I bought iPhone devices worth $1000” or as Muhl pointed “I bought my house for $1.” We can use the above sentence and convert it into a password by taking the first letter of each word like “I bought iPhone devices worth $1000” and the password becomes like this “Ibidw$1000”. “That’s going to give your uppercase, lowercase, a number, and special characters in there,” Muhl said. “It’s something that’s easy to remember. All you gotta do is remember that sentence.” So, what you have to do is to take some phrase or sentence which you use everyday and can be easily remembered. However, many persons are still opting to choose weak passwords instead of super strong passwords. By setting weak passwords, hackers can easily guess passwords by using free software tools like John the Ripper. Muhl also explained that if a password comprises a word which is found in a dictionary with a number at the end can be easily guessed within an hour by using tools like John the Ripper. People are still using their passwords as ‘123456 and ‘password’ respectively, even after many cyber attacks. As we know that passwords are the first priority of defense against hackers. But the hackers are getting more tricky with the each passing day. Using the passwords like this, will only take few seconds to crack. “That is the first thing that we try to go after,” Muhl said. As stated above, Muhl explained that setting dictionary words as password can be be easily cracked by hackers by using tools like John the Ripper. You might have seen enormous text files on various hacker forums, they contain words, phrases numbers and other special characters. It primarily keeps trying combinations of words and numbers until it guesses correct one, the task won’t take long unless the password is weak. However, the technique stated by Muhl makes a dictionary attack impossible. The password is said to be more stronger, if you add more characters, as more the length of password, more will be the time taken to guess it. “The longer your passwords could possibly be,” Muhl said. “The more guesses it’s gonna take for me to get it right.”
