During my TechTalk webinar yesterday I mentioned, yet again, the need for good passwords. In the past I’ve shown sites that will create a good password for you, and sites that will rank you good, or bad, you password is. But yesterday I demoed HowSecureIsMyPassword.net. Instead of telling you whether your password is good or bad, it tells you how long it would take a desktop computer to crack your password.

For example if I enter one of my standard 10 character passwords it tells me that it would take about 163 days to crack. Adding just one character of punctuation to that password (adding, not replacing, to make it an 11 character password) changes that result to 1,000 years. It’s still telling you how good or bad your password is but doing so in a very different way.

So, what’s the breakthrough? Already this morning I’ve had two of my co-workers who attended the webinar come into my office and tell me that they’d used the site and how good, or bad, their passwords were and how they were glad that they had already changed them or would be doing so today. I’ve also heard other conversation about passwords from down the hall with other co-workers.

So, if you’ve been having “the conversation” about passwords in your library and feel like you’re not getting anywhere, trying showing them HowSecureIsMyPassword.net and let me know if you get the same results.