I came upon the article “How I would hack your weak passwords” yesterday and pondered if I should write an article about it. I decided that it would be worth it. The author of the article details how he would try and find out your passwords and get access to all of your accounts in the end. His first approach would be to use the most common used passwords by users on the net. He needs information about your personal life for some passwords but those information can be obtained pretty fast through social engineering. Trying those “top 10″ passwords would already cover a large percentage of online users, statistically speaking that is.

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It is very convenient to save login passwords for internet sites such as forums, blogs or paysites to login quicker to those websites. That is, it is great until you can’t remember the password anymore but would like to know it again. This could be the case if you want to switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox or Opera for instance. Protected Storage Pass View does not only reveal passwords that have been saved in Internet Explorer while accessing protected sites or using the auto complete form but also passwords that have been saved in Outlook Express and MSN Explorer.

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Ever been to an website like www.nytimes.com and had to register to login? Of course you can register a fake account using a disposable email address (like 6url or dodgeit) But there are more people who do that, so why not have a database with these kinds of fake accounts?

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Password chart is an online service that helps you improve the quality of your passwords. The principle is pretty easy: You enter a phrase at the beginning which will be used to create the password chart. An example would be “Make your passwords stronger with passwordchart.com” or “http://www.ghacks.net/ is gr3at”. The password chart will be displayed on the right side of the screen changing while you are adding new chars to the phrase. You can opt to add numbers and punctuation for increased security, they will be added to the chart on the right.

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Most people use easy to remember passwords that are as easy to brute force. The name of your wife, your birthday, a combination of personal data or simple words like password or god. This might be convinient and nice as long as no one tries to break into your account. When this is happening you will quickly realize that insecure passwords are a big security thread.

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