What's the low down on passwords? Think yours is safe? Does it contain what is recommended such as uppercase letters, lowercase letters, digits, and punctuation?

Miscreants can run a hashing algorithm and it would only take about 4 hours to break a password such as N^a&$1nG. However, it would take almost 18 years of processing to crack GoodLuckGuessingThisPassword.

Many sites and organizations require a password of at least 8 characters. "Password1" meets these requirements. And not surprising, it was the most used in a recent study. The longer your password (or passphrase) the harder it is for hackers to crack it. Type in a favorite quote or sentence, omitting spaces, and you've got a decent passphrase.

The most important thing to remember is to make passwords long and therefore strong!