The past few years has seen a large amount of criminal hackers stealing weak passwords and breaking into blogs, e-commerce sites, emails and even social networks like Facebook. Once inside they can do a wide range of damage including stealing your identity, your money, destroying your website, sending millions of spam email messages or all of the above.
This is because people have a tendency to create passwords that are simple to figure out. In other words, weak passwords. We use words like the name of our dog, our old phone number, old street address, birth date, etc. you get the picture. We all do it even tech professionals **who know better** do it. In this day and age we all have too much on our plates to try and remember complex or long passwords let alone five different ones. We'll create one password and use it for every site or application we have to log into. Not once do we think about the consequences because *"it will never happen to me"*. Sound familiar.
One way we can make our lives a little more secure and still maintain a relatively simple way of creating a strong password is to use **passphrases**. What is this you may ask? A passphrase is a phrase that you use on a regular basis in your everyday life and changed a little to make it work as a password. You will remember it because it is engrained in your head for the most part.
Some examples might be:
My_dog's_Name_!s-Monty.
I+wish+I+could+Win+the=lottery!
D0~you~LoVe~M3?
P@uL$m!tH
Creating strong passphrases or passwords will not solve the security issues of the world wide web because there are just too many variables that cannot be controlled like an inept web administrator or poor script coders but by doing your part and using passphrases and/or complex passwords at least you can sleep at night knowing that yours won't be found in a dictionary attack or be easily guessed by the bad guys.
The Weakest Link in Website Security
