What is the smartest password? A smart password includes an uppercase character, a lowercase character, a number (0-9) and/or symbol (such as !, #, or %). It should be 10 or more characters total and include no obvious personal information or common words.
The best, most powerful and strongest passwords are long, hard-to-guess, and unique. That means using a minimum of 15 characters, using words or phrases that are hard to guess and difficult to connect to you, and never reusing passwords across multiple accounts.
Try to include numbers, symbols, and both uppercase and lowercase letters. Avoid using words that can be found in the dictionary. For example, swimming1 would be a weak password. Random passwords are the strongest.
Having a long mix of upper and lower case letters, symbols and numbers is the best way make your password more secure. A 12-character password containing at least one upper case letter, one symbol and one number would take 34,000 years for a computer to crack.
Most hackable passwords
Second came “123456” followed by the slightly longer “123456789.” Rounding out the top five were “guest” and “qwerty.” Most of those log-ins can be cracked in less than a second. You can browse through the whole list on NordPass's website, but here are the 20 that topped the list this year.
What Makes a Password Strong? The key aspects of a strong password are length (the longer the better); a mix of letters (upper and lower case), numbers, and symbols, no ties to your personal information, and no dictionary words.
1Password is one of the best password managers on the market for several reasons. It excels in cross-platform functionality, ease of use, good prices, and, most importantly, robust security. It uses industry-leading encryption technology for your vault and secures each user account with a 34-character security code.
1Password has never had a breach. But if one should occur, a breach of our systems would not put your sensitive vault data at risk. When we designed the security architecture of 1Password, we had to account for the possibility that some day our servers could be compromised.
Use a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols (except symbols or characters with accents, like ñ or â). Avoid common passwords like “password123”; they will be easier to guess. Don't create a password beginning or ending with a blank space.
The double-blind password strategy, also known as "horcruxing", "password splitting", or "partial passwords", involves storing the long and complex part of a password in a password manager and keeping the short unique identifier, such as a PIN code or word, to yourself.
PIN is backed by hardware
The chip includes multiple physical security mechanisms to make it tamper resistant, and malicious software is unable to tamper with the security functions of the TPM. Windows doesn't link local passwords to TPM, therefore PINs are considered more secure than local passwords.
But even a password with 11 characters – again, using a mix of numbers, uppercase and lowercase letters, and symbols – could still take hackers 34 years to crack, Hive Systems estimates. And that's certainly better than eight hours or less.
Increasing the password complexity to a 13 character full alpha-numeric password increases the time needed to crack it to more than 900,000 years at 7 billion attempts per second. This is, of course, assuming the password does not use a common word that a dictionary attack could break much sooner.
As such, strong passwords consist of a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special symbols, such as punctuation. They should be at least 12 characters long, although we'd recommend going for one that's even longer.
Weak passwords are those that are easily guessed by unauthorized users. Examples include “1234”, “password”, “temp”, etc. A weak password poses security risks at two levels—it may enable unauthorized access to confidential information, and may potentially enable an unauthorized user to compromise the system.