Recently there's been a lot of talk online about what makes a good password.
A lot of sites have been talking about people were given bad advice years ago about making
good strong passwords that just isn't working out.
People are breaking into these accounts.
So, what is a weak password and what is a strong password?
Well, here's some examples of weak passwords.
On the one column you see some that are obviously weak like using the word password or the numbers
one through eight.
But you also see some other ones there like just some keys on the keyboard that are easy
to type like qwerty or a name like even a place name like colorado or any word out of
the dictionary.
A person's name, a pets' name, a sports team name.
Even a set of words that's just strung together.
These are all bad passwords and hopefully you know that they're all bad passwords.
The reason they're bad passwords is that they're easy to guess.
There can be lists of thousands or even millions of these commonly used passwords and hackers
or more likely robots will go and try to break into your account using these common passwords.
Now there's also some other passwords.
These are the ones that people have been using for awhile and they're really weak passwords
as well.
But people think they're strong passwords.
They're when you take some of these same type of ideas and you substitute characters.
So maybe and at symbol instead of an a.
Or a five instead of an s or a zero instead of an O. That kind if thing.
Or using things like a string of numbers but the numbers are really dates like maybe your
child's birthday.
Maybe combining something like some different rows of the keyboard or taking a common word
and putting a number after it.
Or even somebody's initials and kind of abbreviating their birth date.
That kind of thing.
These are all bad passwords because they're just as easy to break as the very simple passwords.
They simply exist in databases and if you think you've thought of a clever one it's
probably not true.
There are billions of people in the world with passwords.
Everybody has dozens of passwords so there are hundreds of billions of different passwords
that people are using.
A lot of them are weak.
A lot of them have been found in databases of passwords that have been broken into and
a lot of variations have been guessed and put in these databases that are then tried
against your email address or ID to break into your bank account, your Amazon account,
your iCloud account.
All of that.
So you don't want to use any of these.
Basically the rule is that if a password was though of by you or by any human brain it's
a weak password.
It's got some sort of pattern.
As humans we love patterns.
Our brains love to latch onto patterns, think of patterns, and all of that.
Anything you think of in your head is going to come up with a pattern that can then be
broken by some sort of bot that's just trying lots and lots of passwords.
The way to combat that is to use a truly strong password which is any password that's completely
randomly generated by a computer.
The good news is that Apple makes this easy because built into Mac OS and iOS is the keychain.
The keychain will generate random passwords for you when you need them.
So whether you're changing a password on a current site or signing up for a new one like
this you go to the password field and it's going to suggest a randomly generated password.
This is generated by your Mac and the best thing is that if you use this password then
it will save in the keychain.
That means you don't have to remember it.
Your Mac remembers it for you.
It's encrypted by your user account password and if you use iCloud keychain, which you
should under System Preferences iCloud Keychain, then it can be remembered and used across
all your Macs and all your iOS devices as well.
It's encrypted and protected by your iCloud password.
That's the only one you really need to remember.
The rest are stored in iCloud Keychain so when you go to login to the site later on
it fills in the password for you automatically.