Password Strength Checker

If you’re reading this section, then good – the quickest way to get hacked online is to be too trusting or assume websites are automatically safe. It’s good to be cautious, and it’s never a good idea to enter your legitimate credentials into any website you are not confident about. The ones to watch especially are those who ask you to input your credentials.

So, why is this Password Strength Meter safe?

• The passwords you type never leave your browser, and we don’t store them (You can disconnect your internet connection and then try it if you wish).
• All the checking is done on the page you’re on, not on our servers.
• Even if the password was sent to us, we wouldn’t actually know who you were anyway – so couldn’t match it up to any usernames or any websites you may visit.
• We’re in the business of making people more secure online, and the last thing we want to see is passwords being transmitted across the internet insecurely.

How does img555’s Password Strength Checker work? The password strength calculator uses various techniques to check how strong a password is:

• It uses common password dictionaries, regular dictionaries, first name and last name dictionaries, and others.
• It performs substitution attacks on common words and names, replacing letters with numbers and symbols.
• It checks for sequences of characters being used such as “12345” or “67890”.
• It checks for proximity of characters on the keyboard such as “qwert” or “asdf”.

Strong Passwords Tips and Tricks

Common mistakes and misconceptions

1. Replacing letters with digits and symbols: This technique is well known to hackers, so swapping an “E” for a “3” or a “5” for a “$” doesn’t make you much more secure.
2. Meeting the minimum requirements: By today’s standards, an 8-character password won’t make you very secure.
3. Using the same password a lot: What if the website is hacked? Do you know how the website stores your password?

Weak practices:

• Storing passwords in the notes field on your phone, does it auto sync to the cloud, iCloud, or Dropbox.
• Putting them in a spreadsheet, even password-protecting a spreadsheet doesn’t keep the information safe.

What makes a strong password?

A strong password is one that’s either not easily guessed or not easily brute-forced. To make it not easily guessed, it can’t be a simple word; to make it not easily cracked, it needs to be long and complex. Supercomputers can go through billions of attempts per second to guess a password. Try to make your passwords a minimum of 14 characters.

Passphrase

A passphrase is simply a password that’s longer; it could be a sentence, with spaces and punctuation in it. The benefit of a passphrase is that typically they’re easier to remember, but more difficult to crack due to their length. For every additional character in the length of a password or passphrase, the time it would take to break increases exponentially. Ultimately, having a long password or passphrase can make you far more secure than having a short one with some symbols or numbers in it.