If you want to test how secure your password is and learn how to create secure passwords that are still easy to remember, you have come to the right place. At www.grc.com/haystack.htm you can find an online tool that calculates how long current technology would take to crack a particular password.
First, though, a short introduction to creating a secure password that is also easy to remember. http://xkcd.com has the following comic entitled “Password Strength”.
The figures showing how long it would take to discover the password “Tr0ub4dor&3” at 1,000 attempts per second can be checked with the online tool at www.grc.com/haystack.htm. Admittedly, it produces somewhat different results, but that is not the point here. In any case, it really does take considerably longer to crack the password “correcthorsebatterystaple”.
Finally, I want to use the following screenshot from www.grc.com/haystack.htm to show how this method can be used to create a password that is genuinely easy to remember and considerably more secure. In this example, the password is “geheimesPWD#01”. PWD stands for “password”, while the hash symbol represents a form of “number”.
