Is your password hack-able?

Yeah, once again I managed to crack another password. Now, it's a password belongs to one of the Technical Assistant (TA) in my college. I able to crack it not because I'm smart or whatever but it's due to the TA's weak password.

Therefore, this posting focuses on how to have a strong password.

The following are the characteristics of a strong password that will take years to crack unless the cracker use a supercomputer to crack it. Your password:

• Has to be more than eight charcters
• Shall not be a word
• Must be the combination of UpperCaSe, $ymbol$ and numb3r5.

The typical password cracking will be something like this:

• Searching the dictionary to get the same code that belongs to the password (Hash)
• Brute-force cracking: Running combinations with numbers.
• If the hacker still can't get it, the last choice will be using brute-force method with the character set including alphabets, numbers and symbols (The longer it is, the more time it takes, probably year(s) except using supercomputer.)

How ever social-engineering also is another manual method. Therefore, no matter what it is, NEVER accidentally give your password's charcteristics to anyone. E.g. the hacker might ask some questions to know more about your password.

Therefore, please follow the guidelines provided. You're identification is very valuable even if you are not in higher positions.

I'm not a hacker. Even a kid who knows how to use Google can be a hacker.