A guest post from the ProtonMail Blog

You probably already know some obvious password safety tips, like don’t use “password” as your password. But did you know that a password like “Ch@ll3ng3r%$” is not much more secure? Sure, it mixes upper- and lower-case letters, numbers and special characters, like you’re often advised to do when creating a password for a new account. And yet a hacker could crack it using a dictionary attack in an hour or two. “Challenger” is a common base word, and the modifications are too simplistic to fool most hackers.

You may be thinking that no hacker would bother attacking you personally, and you’re probably right. The danger is not that a hacker will target you, but rather that your password will be part of a larger data breach. If you use a weak password, hackers can extract it from the database along with all the other weak passwords.

Therefore, your goal is to create a password that will be difficult for a hacker with a powerful computer to crack, while also being simple enough to memorize. This article will explain exactly how to do that, as well as offer some advice on what to do with your strong password once you’ve thought of it. But first it’s helpful to understand a bit about how online services use passwords to manage account access and how hackers can steal your credentials.

Continue reading → ProtonMail: How to create a strong password