Tech Tip – How To Make Your Passwords Really Difficult To Crack

Password seem to be easier and easier to crack, especially as computers get more powerful.  Things like a brute force password attacks where a computer just keeps on trying to crack a password by just constantly trying and trying with different passwords.

Here is how to add an extra layer to thwart attacks:

Use Emojis!

This may sound surprising but Kaspersky recently highlighted how some online service providers allow the use of emojis in your passwords to massively increase the strength of the password.

The up side of using emojis is that it increases the number of possibilities that the password complexity could jump from approx 100 permutations per character (which is what you would get with normal letters, numbers and punctuation combinations) to approx. 4000 permutations per character (which is what you get when you use Unicode emojis).

To put this in context, it would take the same time to crack a password of just five emojis, as it would to crack a traditional password with nine standard characters of letters, numbers and punctuation.

The longer the password length using Emojis, the more time it would take and it is exponential so for each unicode character / emoji that is used.

You need to do some investigating to see if your service provider does support emojis in passwords, for example we know that Dropbox and OpenAI both do and so can increase the difficulty to hack by many factors.

Try it and see how you get on! 😉😁