Students in Ms. Kahn’s class were reading an article about how many Americans are upset that the United States government could be reading their email or wiretapping their phones. However, there are other sources of threats to our privacy besides the government. Criminals often try to steal money or learn personal information about people by figuring out the passwords for their online accounts. Despite this danger, many unsuspicious internet users choose passwords that are very easy to guess. One study found that some of the most common passwords are “password,” “password1,” “123abc,” and “abc123”! Experts in online privacy have come up with ways to help eliminate the chance that a stranger could guess your password. The best passwords are longer than 12 characters, are not words you can find in the dictionary, and include some numbers and symbols.

“We should probably look at the passwords we use and make sure they are secure!” said Ryan after reading about this issue.

Eva wondered how many internet users had unsafe passwords. To find out, she did some research and found a report online that had data on 435,564 passwords cracked during security tests over the course of one year.

Discussion Question:

The length of a password impacts how secure it is. For example, Trustwave reports that eight-character passwords can be easily cracked in one day, whereas 10-character passwords could take 19.5 months to decode. Do you think that the mixture of character types used (letters, symbols, and numbers) will also affect the time required to crack a password? If so, which do you think is more important for password security: length or character type?