Today the passwords are the digital counterpart of your's physical keys, they have the same value for your accounts in the digital world. So, if you want to protect your secrets and your precious data you have to choose a strong password: some people are just using the password manager (many websites provide this kind of service) that generate an unique string up to 16 characters for each applicant's use, others use words (one or several as a phrases) with space or special characters as word delimiter or combination of case-sensitive letters, numbers and special characters. Multi-word passwords are the ones with several words delimited by space.
The fastest and the easiest way to crack a password is to ask for it (in one form or another). The second most easiest method is to find out as much as you can about the targeted person and to guess his/her password - most people use familiar easy-to-remember words or phrases (as movie titles, favourite book, actor or sport team, etc.). When a hacker has no such information they have to attack your protected account in order to find password. Dictionary attacks are when the hackers try out all the words in dictionaries and systematically try to access the password accounts using automated tools.
Some consider that multi-word passwords are stronger that singular word, but according to some research conducted by the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory (Sophos Security) they can still be cracked by hackers through dictionary attacks.
The brute force attack, when all the possible combination of letters, numbers and special characters are tried, is the last attack usually used. It takes the most of time, a PC could crack a common password in matter of years, and some websited are programmed to react to such attacks by denying "log in"s after a number of consecutive unsuccesful trials.
Recently Digital Journal reported on another study that found 'Password1' was the most common password used by global businesses.
The authorities and their computer software experts are realizing the vulnerability that multi-passwords are creating for hackers, they are continuosly researching the possibilities of making it more difficult for thefts to take place on the Internet. And, of course, it is in the best interest of the public that the relevant authorities move fast to lower the rise of Internet thefts.
