How Strong is your Password?

This is common knowledge; you should use a combination of alphabets, numerical digits, and special characters (!, @) to create strong passwords. Yet, the most commonly used password on the Internet is 123456 followed by 12345.

The following visualization courtesy CXO categorizes some of the popular passwords based on their strength – it might appear a little funny but lot of people are actually using such simple, easy-to-guess passwords for their online accounts.

How Strong is your Password?

Online services like Google’s Gmail or WordPress have password meters that calculate the strength of password as you type more characters into the box. Microsoft too offers an online tool that will instantly tell if your password is strong or weak.

There’s however one downside with most of these password checking tools – they’ll tell you that your password is weak (and thus easy to crack) but you won’t know why the password string has been labeled weak and what you can do to strengthen it.

Enter Password Meter – this is an online tool that will not only rate your password’s strength but will offer clues on what you kind of characters can you add or remove to improve the password’s strength. For instance, the complexity of password “Hell@Wor1d!” can be improved by removing consecutive lowercase letters.

Related: Choose a Safe Password Manager