You are probably tired of us techie people banging on about having a safe and secure password, saying well who wants to hack into my sites and anyway my password is really tough to guess.

Well firstly, saying it’s tough to guess is no guarantee that it actually is. I once “cracked” someone’s PC’s password  with nothing more sophisticated that the password clue that Windows lets you set and my trusty Blackberry. (Don’t worry, they are family and they’d made the mistake of saying to me that I’d never guess it. And once they had recovered from the shock, they listen to me on security matters)

Secondly, most password breaking isn’t done by someone trying password after password, it’s done by some sneaky software that tries out dictionary words, common keyboard combination such as 123 etc

Take a look at the picture on the right that shows someone/something trying to access a site I manage

Can you see (in the the red ovals I’ve put on) where they’ve made a “guess” that the login name is admin? And can you see where they’ve “guessed” the password with words like “focal faire” “Ferrari” and “enter” etc

I hope it’s not rocket science to see why a user name like admin is a bad choice and similarly that real words don’t make good passwords.  Nor does “qwerty”