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Passwords make for cracking fun
Rod Main is another reader suffering from password trouble – just like, we think, the rest of you.
‘About a year ago we were told we had to use passwords that were at least eight characters long,’ he says. ‘They have to be a mixture of characters and numbers, have at least one capital letter and at least one non-alphanumeric.’
Otherwise known as strong passwords – except that the average password isn’t that strong.
‘The trouble is, to make such passwords memorable, you have to use something that is easier to guess – Fred$123, August-1964; making you comply with a set of rules actually makes it easier to crack a password. This is hardly news: this is how they cracked the Enigma codes at Bletchley.’
If only Hitler had used Windows, they would have had the entire plans for the invasion of Britain in PowerPoint format.
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