There’s a free tool available to test the strength of your passwords and pass phrases. You can use  https://apps.cygnius.net/passtest/ and enter each password one at a time to check its strength by an “entropy score”. It tells you how long it would take for a hacker to crack your password using common cracking tools.

In the example below, you can see the password entered is “yourp@ssw0rd”. The details show that this password, even though it uses zero for the letter O and special character @ for the a. Common cracking tools can guess your password instantly. 

Your take away from this example is, of course, to change your passwords and passphrases, increasing their complexity and length. As a rule, the more variables you include in a password, the stronger the security. Instead of “yourp@ssw0rd” you could use “strongP@$$phr@z”. You can see, in the image below, that this combination is much stronger. Using common cracking tools, it would take centuries to guess this password.

Try any of your passwords and passphrases and adjust them as needed. Don’t forget that it should be something you can remember and add multi-factor authentication (covered in a previous blog entry) for all of your sensitive information logins.