A word about passwords

As processing power has multiplied, so too has the ease at which a brute force attack can crack the password to your computer. What ever you do, don't use common words that can be hacked with a dictionary attack .

• Consider a four-letter password, all lowercase "abcd" for example. There are 26 letters in the alphabet so there are (26 * 26 * 26 * 26) = 456,976 possibilities. That is not much of a challenge for a computer to crack.
  
  
• If we mix upper case (A-Z) and lower case (a-z) we get (52 * 52 * 52* 52) = 7,311,616 possibilities. That's better but still pretty easy for a computer to crack.
  
  
• If we add digits (0-9) to the mix we get (62 * 62 * 62 * 62) or 14,776,336 possibilities.
  
  
• By adding special characters to the mix (~!@#$%^&*+-:"<>?/\|) we can increase the possibilities to 92 or so. This gives us (92 * 92 * 92 * 92) = 71,639,296.
  
  
• Increasing the number of characters in your password goes a long way toward creating computer security. Using the above example with 8 characters we get (92 * 92 * 92 * 92 * 92 * 92 * 92 * 92) = 5,132,188,731,375,616 possibilities.
  
  
• The problem is, trying to remember something like Mfcc$960 is difficult. Remembering the name of the street, or your mother's name is easy but not secure. This is where anagrams help.
  
  
• Think of a sentence. For this example we'll use " My first car cost $960". If we use the first letter of each word along with the special characters and digits we get Mfcc$960.
  
  

...and now for something truly scary