Hacking passwords ain’t cool, but it’s hot! Hacking someone’s password might be difficult, but not impossible. From always I had one question in my mind – how hackers read your mind and crack the password? Well, after doing some quick research with my best friend Google, I got some light focused on my doubts. There are several password cracking tools available that hackers use to crack or hack anyone’s password and surprisingly most of the times they hit it right!

When your password gets stolen or hacked, you should not blame either your fate or the hacker. You should blame YOU first. Were you using the following password methods before your password hacking :

1. 123456, abcdef or asdfgh
2. partner, children or your name
3. “password” as your password
4. pet name, college name or country name
5. date of birth
6. “god” or “devil”
7. “love” or “letmein” or “money”
8. mobile number, phone number
9. website’s name as password
10. “cancer”, “aids”, “welcome”
11. List goes on…

If you have your password in the above formats, you may need to change it as soon as possible. Hackers don’t believe on guesses, they rely on permutation and combination. It’s really easy to hack above common passwords using password crackers and here you can find the top 10 password crackers.

Now let’s say that your password has been hacked. If you were using that same password across all websites, the hacker can hack other account’s password as well. If they cracked your internet banking or credit card account password, you can guess the outcomes. In order to avoid such unpleasant incidents, you need to keep your password really strong and unpredictable.

Here is a chart that shows the time taken by the password crackers to crack your password. The more stronger password, the more time it will take to crack passwords.

From the above screenshot it’s clear that passwords with only lowercase characters can easily be cracked, where passwords containing both lowercase and uppercase characters can make it really difficult for the hacker. Here are some password tips :

• Don’t make your password predictable. You can do so by substituting numbers with letters and vice verse. (e.g – letter “O” can be written as number zero “0″, or letter “a” can be replaced with symbol “@”).
• Use uppercase and lowercase numbers randomly throughout the password (e.g – @mER1cAbLue5).
• Never use a English dictionary word as your password as a brute force attack can pull out the password easily.
• You may keep a place you loved, your favourite restaurant, favourite actor’s last film name as password.
• Keep different username and password combinations for different websites. A hacker can hack into all your site’s passwords if he finds one. So, never keep the same password and username combination elsewhere.
• Use RoboForm password manager to manage all your passwords
• Using Microsoft’s password checker. you can check how secure your password is.

And the last but not the least tip : Never store or write your passwords in a paper, cell phone, diary etc. Keep your password confidential and secure enough.