New demands in digital era (passwords and security)

The more complex your password, the harder they become to crack. Using a flimsy password just enables your juicy secrets to get stolen easily. Research shows that an 8-characters-long password containing numbers, upper and lower case letters can be decrypted in 41 days. However, if you increase this length from 8 to 10 characters, it would take 8 years to crack instead.

A research lab tested how password format and length affect decryption time:

Password Format                                                           Length                    Decryption Time
Numbers only                                                                  6                                1 second
Upper & lower letters                                                     6                                33 minutes
Upper & lower letters                                                     8                                62 days
Numbers + Upper & Lower case letters                   8                                253 days
Numbers, Upper & Lower case + punctuations    8                                23 years

In the digital era, people have become overwhelmed with having to remember so many passwords. To bolster your security, setting strong passwords is crucial however.

Techniques for setting passwords

A short simple password in an ordered letter combination is the easiest situation for hackers. They can break them really quickly. Here are some easy-to-follow tips for setting passwords:

1. Long and complex is always best.
The random combination of numbers + letters + symbols makes passwords incredibly strong.

2. Use info that’s secretly special to you.
Try a sentence from your favourite poem or songs. Use different passwords for different accounts.

3. Add particular web info to your different accounts passwords. We recommend you set different passwords for different website accounts. However, it might be easy to forget them. How about adding site names into the password? For instance, passwords for ebay: “ebay”+”bluemysz378”; passwords for twitter: ”bluemysz378”+”twitter”.

4. Replace letters and numbers in your own way: a→@; s→$; 1→!

5. Check your password strength