You might think your passwords are secure, but I know your password for every websites is "password". Not so secure after all!
Alright, your password probably isn't "password", but millions of people do have that as their passwords, and your password may not be much better. The most common password is 123456, after all.
If your password 5 or less characters which are all lowercase letters, it can be cracked in only a few hours at most, and even the conventional 8 letter limit can still leave seemingly strong passwords to take only a few months, which may sound like a lot, but think about how long ago you made your account for some websites, and how long you intend to keep them.
That's not to say you need to make your password a complex 50 letter string of characters, because at the end of then day, the reason most people don't have secure passwords is out of fear of forgetting them. Just today, I forgot a password for a website, and while it luckily wasn't very important, there is still a clear risk of password forgetting.
There are a couple things that can be done about that, firstly, a password manager can be used, either through an external website or app, or even the one Google has by default. These are good because you only have to remember one password, making it just as convinent as having one password for all your websites without the glaring security risk.
Below is a poster that I created on the security of various passwords and how long they take to crack.
This poster proves that it is always important to include many numbers, uppercase letters, and special characters, but at the end of the day, what determines the security of a password above all else is its length.
Password security affects everyone, and as such I find it to be a very important topic. It is also very easy to cover and intuitive, and I find it interesting to test strong and weak passwords, as well as checking the strength of my own (some weren't too secure).
At the end of the day, password security is up to you, and any way that you find to be effective would be something you could use, whether it be something listed above or a different concept entirely, your password affects you more than anyone else, so you are the one who can chose to make it secure, or not.
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