My friend Michelle recently explained to me that password is a perfectly valid password to use. Her reason? “People always say not to use it. So now that nobody uses it anymore, it’s totally secure again!” How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords In this case, Michelle made a fatal assumption. She assumed that human beings would be manually typing in guessed passwords. What she failed to understand is that it’s really, really easy for any off-the-shelf computer to chew through possible passwords at an incredible pace.

I learned at a relatively young age what makes a good password versus a bad password, and I’ve tried to always use these qualities in the passwords that I choose. The Problem Unfortunately, even with the best intentions, you inevitably end up re-using one or a few passwords across every single website you log into. Some people do things as dumb as using the name of their significant other. Or their pet. Or a birthdate. Or something else equally guessable by one of the many supercomputers that exist (whereby “supercomputer”, I mean pretty much any computer invented in the past 5–7 years).