the_william•26d agoMost Upvoted

A reddit comment made me realize my password manager master password was weak

Someone on a thread pointed out that my 10 character master password only had lowercase letters and numbers. I switched to a 16 character mix with symbols and special characters and now I feel way more secure about my vault. Has anyone else had to rework their master password after getting feedback?

3 comments

3 Comments

logan_ellis26d ago

Used to think a simple passphrase was good enough until someone showed me how fast those get cracked. Really opened my eyes to how much stronger a random mix of everything is. Now I make sure mine has all four character types just to sleep better at night.

leodavis25d ago

Did you ever find out what tool they used to show you the cracking speeds? I've been curious about that myself. @logan_ellis I had a similar wakeup call a few years back when a friend who works in IT ran my old passphrase through some testing software. It was humbling to see how fast something that felt clever got broken. I ended up going with a random set of letters and numbers from a generator, and I keep it stored in a password manager now. It's a pain to set up at first, but once I got used to it, I stopped worrying so much every time I hear about another data breach. These days I'd rather deal with a little inconvenience than gamble with my accounts.

derek_perez25d ago

Changed mine from 'password123' after a friend laughed at me. Yeah, it was that bad. Now I've got some 18 character mess with symbols and caps that I have to look up every time I log in. At least I know nobody's cracking that thing before I can type it wrong five times and get locked out.