Most people nowadays have passwords protecting their user accounts on their Macs. Even a weak password is better than no password, but a strong password is better. The weakest passwords are easy to guess, like your last name, address, the number 1234, the word password, or similar things.
You’d be surprised at how many customers come through with 1234 or password as their protection. Or even worse, the password hint will be the password. 1234 or password are usually the first two things I try if someone can’t remember what they set as a password. The strongest passwords are those that are very long (16+ characters) and made up of random unrelated words, like “correcthorsebatterystaple.”
For an example of how secure specific types of passwords are I’m going to give examples and show you how long a basic computer would take to crack it.
The password 1234 would take approximately 0.02401 seconds to crack. This is on a computer using its CPU (not GPU based cracking), with basic software cracking methods running 100,000 passwords a second.
Someone using letters, numbers and symbols is in a better situation. A password like l33th4×0r would take approximately 6 years to crack.
correcthorsebatterystaple would take 2.888 × 10^21 years (if I’m remembering my math studies right that’s 2,888,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years) under the same situation as the first two examples. If you go this route keep the password length at around 16 characters, four words should be sufficient. Generally the longer the password the more secure it is; repeating 1234 four times doesn’t count!
I used the Wolfram Alpha network admin assistant app for the iPad to calculate these cracking times. Be aware that as computers develop, and software becomes more powerful those cracking times are only going to decrease. It is also possible to use graphics processors to run password cracking software and these are significantly faster.
So the moral of my rambling is: set a password, make it a string of four unrelated words that you can easily remember, don’t use the same password for your Mac as you do for your email or other websites. Every place you need to have a password for should have a different password!
While Macs are not as vulnerable to viruses as PCs, you can still get hacked—especially if your home wireless network has no password or you use your computer on public Wi-Fi. It’s easier than you think to spoof a Wi-Fi connection and grab all the data coming and going from your computer. Finally, NEVER do personal banking from an unprotected or public Wi-Fi no matter how secure your passwords are.