• Newsfeed
  • viral

This is Edward Snowden’s Advice to John Oliver for an Unhackable Password

1 minute read

Edward Snowden has bad news for you: Your computer password is probably terrible.

In a web extension of his Sunday interview with John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, Snowden laid out the bad news: “For somebody who has a very common 8-character password, it can literally take less than a second for a computer to go through possibilities and pull that password out.”

Less than one second.

“My password is five characters,” Oliver said. “That’s not a joke. That’s bad, right?”

Snowden agreed it is really bad.

So what should people do for their passwords? While Oliver’s suggestion of “limpbiscuit4eva” was a flop, Snowden had some helpful advice: Forget about passwords and go with “passphrases,” or phrases that are long, unique, and thus easy to remember. Like “margaretthatcheris110%SEXY”.

A computer would never get it, and you’d never forget it.

Read next: Watch John Oliver Tell Edward Snowden No One Knows Who He Is

Listen to the most important stories of the day.

More Must-Reads From TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com