A few months back I read a piece on this subject over at Lifehacker. Again even then it wasn’t really that surprising to me as to the efficacy of our passwords. It makes me laugh reading this that we even have passwords given how easy it is to get the information.
Many sites especially Government sites are notorious for changing password requirements all the time. Some sites went from having an update when you want to update every six months to update every threee months…
Other sites such as banks have updated their requirements so you cannot reuse the same password, or even up to the last 15 passwords.
Of course when it comes to passwords simple dictionary words are horrible and even substituting a symbol or number for a letter just won’t cut it for a brute force attack. You are better off using something like this suggestion from XKCD http://xkcd.com/936/.
For the lazy there are other methods like a smart spreadsheet. Excel or even my favorite Libre Office allow you to create random numbers for a cell. These random numbers can then be generated to recall a letter a number or a symbol from elsewhere in the spreadsheet. apparently documents can’t be shared on blogger, I will have to find a way share a sample one a created. In the meantime contact me if you wasn’t an easy sample card.
Update: Try this google doc
-BrotherLeRoy
