Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger

Thanks to real-world data, the keys to your digital kingdom are under assault.

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[Smeghead]

I've been an advocate for a while now of creating a passwords from several words that otherwise have no association with each other. This results in a long password that's infinitely easier to type than alphabet soup (especially on mobile devices) and more importantly, easy to remember.

I was overjoyed to see that XKCD covered this a while back with his usual panache. It described it much more succinctly than I ever could.

Unfortunately, I've gotten to the point where I have far too many passwords to remember, and have taken to using a password manager for those that aren't so critical. Those tend to be complete gibberish that I don't have to remember and are as long as their respective services will allow.