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.”
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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.
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