Create a secure password

Today, we encounter passwords constantly and everywhere. Whether it's e-mail, online banking, social networks or other services on the Internet, we are now confronted with a password practically everywhere. However, the sheer number of passwords often leads people to come up with passwords that are as easy to remember as possible.

It is also not uncommon for a password to be used for several services at once. This convenience can quickly take its toll, however, and opens the door to hackers and fraudsters. Because practically all services on the Internet are password-protected today, you should think about your protection as carefully as possible.

Laziness, poor memory and underestimating the dangers on the net are the main causes of poor password protection.

Among the most popular insecure passwords are combinations like 123456, qwertz, abc123 or even the very simple term password itself. Anyone using such passwords has practically no protection and might as well omit the password.

Names of friends and relatives or dates of birth are also not recommended. Here, too, the risk of being recognized is too great. Finally, experts generally advise against using words or terms that can be found in the Duden dictionary or in other languages. Combinations that are too short are also generally not a good idea.

Both have too high a probability of being detected by resourceful hackers.

After clarifying which passwords are insecure, the question arises as to what makes a good password. In general, experts recommend choosing a password with an arbitrary sequence of characters.

Ideally, this should include both upper and lowercase letters as well as a few numbers. For even greater security, special characters can also be used. In addition, users must always pay attention to the length. A password should contain at least 12 characters to be considered truly secure.

If a random sequence of characters is too complex for you, you can also use a combination of words and numbers. However, you should not make it too simple here either. Instead of a password like Schatz148, it is better to use 1scH4tZ8. This combination is considerably more secure and therefore preferable to the conventional spelling.

The problem with passwords is usually not creating the most secure one possible. Most people have more difficulty remembering them. Especially with random combinations, remembering is anything but easy. If you then create a password for every service on the net, the whole thing becomes even more difficult.

A good technique for remembering passwords has proven to be the use of a password set. For example, a password like MV(J)i52Jag can be remembered using the first letters of the words in the sentence "My father (Jürgen) has turned 52".

Despite the password sets, however, the sheer number of passwords in today's world still remains a problem. For this reason, it is advisable to prioritize. While you should definitely use strong passwords for important services, simpler and thus easy-to-remember passwords are sufficient for many things, such as forums.

The US company SplashData has identified the worst passwords:

The number combination 123456 is in first place.

2nd place goes to "password" (in German-speaking countries, this is probably passwort)

• The other places go to

• 12345

• 12345678

• qwerty (or depending on the keyboard layout qwertz)

• 123456789

• 1234

The own experience of the spasmodic login attempts of various bots shows that here also the "admin" and "root" is tried as password.

On the net there are various tools to try out how long it would take until a password would be cracked by a bot. Here you find the rough times of the above listed "passwords".

• 123456 is cracked immediately

• With password it takes at least 0.161 seconds until the bot can log in.

• The following number combinations are not worth mentioning, because here the time measurement simply shows 0 seconds.

• Only qwertz ( 0,07 sec ), admin (0,028 sec ) and root ( 0,078 sec ) show something on the second hand ( even if less than 0,1 second ! ).

If you have found your password here, it's high time to create a new and secure password, so that you can use your account without any problems and you don't get a bad surprise!