The Security Mentor

An intruder who can't simply guess your password will likely start a computer program to guess it. The intruder has to get a break to make this work, because any sane login system will get suspicious after a few wrong passwords. But that kind of break happens all the time and intruders can then test millions of possible passwords per second.

You've heard that you should never use a word in a dictionary. There's more to it than that. Password-guessing programs use word lists tnat include foreign words, names of fictional characters, and Bible verses. You need to avoid all of those.

Here are excerpts from one such word list. If you picked any of these for a password and thought it was too obscure to guess, you'd be wrong and a password-guessing program would get it in less than a second.

• /.,mnb
• ADDIVINOLA
• ALAGUERATEGUY
• BARAKATUNISA
• yalekosarek
  
• obi wan kenobi
• uhura
• L;urette

Good passwords look random.