Did you think you had a secure password?
January 3rd, 2010 by Andreas from Xavier Media®Did you think you had a secure password for your email for example? Or maybe you think that the password you use for Facebook, Myspace, Twitter or Plurk is uncrackable? Then you need to rethink!
Most people use a word found in any dictionary (doesn't matter language) and just that word as password. I have even seen statistic showing that people just use the word password as password 
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Using the password calculator at XavierMedia.com I'm going to show you how easy it is to crack your password using just a normal PC. If we return to the case where some people use password as password, their account can be cracked using brute force in less than 1 minute!!!!! If you don't believe me just check the calculator results here.
So the important thing here is to mix upper case and lower case letters together with numbers and also to move away from using dictionary words.
By just using a random combination of uppercase and lower case letters mixed with just one number you increase the time it takes to crack your password by almost half an hour (17 minutes and 24 seconds). If we also increase the password length to 12 characters instead of 8 it will take about 5,500 days to crack the password 
A 12 character password can be a little bit hard to remember so if we return to a length of 8 characters again and add some random special characters (like % or ?). Then we get a slightly better result than the first 8 character example (26 minutes and 24 seconds). So the important thing here to remember when you select a password is to not use a dictionary word and mix random characters of all types to make a password as secure as possible.
It can of course be hard to make up a completely random password, so therefore we've created a password generator for you. The generator can create random passwords of any combination of upper case and lower case letters, special characters and numbers. You can also select any length between 5 and 40 characters you like. Once you've generated a password you think is secure you can test it in the calculator by pressing abuttin in the password generator below you newly generated password
Give it a try and let us know the results!
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January 9th, 2010 at 4:17 am
January 9th, 2010 at 8:40 am
Having different passwords, use passwords with symbols and keeping all software on the server up to date are the important things you need to focus on to make sure your site is as hard as possible to hack. I'm glad you got help from Hostgator to solve the problems because I know of some other hosts that don't even care if their servers contain malware and they strictly refuse to help any customers having problems. The sad thing is that these web hosts keep such a low price that the customer keep returning anyway….
January 10th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
I {still-hopefully not anymore} had an unknown hacker, post obscene and pornographic endorsements on my personal websites,even after changing my usernam and password several times.These pointers have been useful for me.Thanks a lot and GOD BLESS,Tremendously.
January 10th, 2010 at 3:30 pm
Maybe you should check your computer for malware/spyware? Microsoft got a free antivirus software which is really good: http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/
Updating your email password could also be a good idea especially if the attacker have access to your email account and then can have your new passwords sent to that email address.
January 16th, 2010 at 3:41 am
Yeah you are right. password stealing something very common now a days. So be careful and make use of very odd kind of password patterns.
January 16th, 2010 at 10:53 am
Thank you for password generator apps + the calculator for analyze random password.
Also today, any web apps should be put an captcha (even maybe some captcha can easy recognize by OCR), or limiting failed login, ie; if you failed login for 5 times will suspended for 1-2 hours to login anymore.