Setting a Secure Password
Passwords are a pain aren’t they. Often difficult to remember, but does that make them difficult to hack? The answer, unfortunately, is often no! 
When you go online and register with a new web site, chances are you will be asked to create a password for your new account. Do you use the same one you’ve used elsewhere, basically because you can remember it? I bet you do! Most people fall into this trap.And how secure is that password? We’ve all heard the horror stories about major service provider sites getting hacked and user details being stolen. The Sony Playstation network springs to mind as a high profile example from earlier this year. Even if the site owner takes security sensibly and stores all user details in encrypted form, and don’t assume that’s always the case, you are still not necessarily safe.
For an 8 character password, made up of upper and lower case letters plus one or more digits, there are around 221 trillion possible combinations. That sounds a lot, and indeed it is.
However, most hackers will try the brute force method of cracking encrypted passwords i.e. making large numbers of guesses in a short time. With the power of modern computing, they have the means to check through all the possible combinations of an 8 character password in a few hours. Yes, all 221 trillion. Scary eh!
So what happens if you make your password say, 10 or 12 characters long? Well, for a 10 character password, there are around 850 quadrillion (853,058,371,866,181,866) possible combinations and a brute force attack would take months. With a 12 character password, the number of possible combinations is around the 3 sextillion mark. Rest more easy, a brute force attack would probably take centuries to run through the possible combinations!
So, there is an easy answer here. To make your passwords as secure as possible, the longer they are the better. 10 characters is better than 8, 12 better than 10. Make sure you use a combination which includes both upper and lower case plus one or more digits and other characters. Try not to include proper names if you can help it. This way you are making life difficult for the cyber criminals out there.