Are Your Internet Passwords Secure?

We might as well just go ahead and admit it: sometimes, we get lazy with our internet passwords. After all, it seems like anymore we have way too many passwords to remember. There’s the email password, the online banking password, the Facebook password, the work email password, and on and on the list goes. By the end of the day, we’re lucky to even remember one of our passwords! That’s one of the main reasons why we get lazy and complacent with our passwords. We use our kid’s names, or our pet’s names, or really easy number sequences that we couldn’t forget if we tried. And that’s all well and good until someone figures out your password and hacks into your account. Even if you think you have a fairly safe and difficult password, maybe you shouldn’t be so sure…at least until you run it through this website.

Telepathwords is a Microsoft Research project that exists to guess your passwords and to help you make them more secure. Just how good is it? It’s shockingly good.

So…About Those Passwords…

After you get over your initial fear of entering your passwords to a completely random site, it’s pretty neat to see how programs (and hackers) can guess our passwords based on certain letters we type and how long it takes us to type them.

As soon as you type a letter, Telepathwords will attempt to guess the next letter based on what you typed. For example, if you type “ap”, it might start to guess apple, apartment, or april, and it gets closer and closer with each subsequent letter or number you enter. I tried out some older passwords that I thought were pretty secure and they were no match for telepathwords, which means they would’ve been no match for a decent hacker either.

In case you’re afraid of entering your passwords to Telepathwords, Microsoft assures us that everything is completely encrypted and no password information is stored. They just want to inspire everyone to come up with and use better passwords in the future.

If you’d like to try out your password(s), you can click here.

[Images via outsidethebeltway & softpedia]

SOURCE: http://gizmodo.com/oh-good-a-magical-internet-machine-that-guesses-your-p-1477249040