Password Strength Meter

The Password Meter site provides a handy little Password Strength Meter. If your password doesn’t rate in the green as ‘strong’, consider a new password. The rules include:

  • At least nine characters long.
  • Upper- and lower-case letters.
  • At least one number.
  • At least one special symbol (i.e., #, $, %, etc.).

Strong password examples; tested green in the meter:

  • DBU$er88
  • Str0ngP@ssw0rd (very strong!)
  • DBU$er88

Test yours and see!

Original Posting: June 24, 2005

About Michael Coates
I am a pragmatic evangelist. The products, services and solutions I write about fulfill real-world expectations and use cases. I stay up-to-date on real products I use and review, and share my thoughts here. I apply the same lens when designing an architecture, product or when writing papers. I am always looking for ways that technology can create or enhance a business opportunity .. not just technology for technology's sake. My CV says: Seasoned technology executive, leveraging years of experience with enterprise and integration architectural patterns, executed with healthy doses of business acumen and pragmatism. That's me. My web site says: Technology innovations provide a myriad of opportunities for businesses. That said, having the "latest and greatest" for its own sake isn't always a recipe for success. Business successes gained through exploiting innovation relies on analysis of how the new features will enhance your business followed by effective implementation. Goals vary far and wide: streamlining operations, improving customer experience, extending brand, and many more. In all cases, you must identify and collect the metrics you can apply to measure your success. Analysis must be holistic and balanced: business and operational needs must be considered when capitalizing on a new technology asset or opportunity.

2 Responses to Password Strength Meter

  1. of course it also goes without saying that you should never use the same password for multiple sites… creating a code that allows you to easily vary the password site by site is also important…

    for instance, create a generic, secure password and then for each site take (say) the first three letters of the URL and transpose them in a predictable way (go up or down a row on the keyboard, one place right or left etc) and use that at the start/end of the password

    • Totally agree .. I highly recommend a formula for a secure password; rules that you remember over the password itself.

      What bugs me is the differential with sites that REQUIRE special characters against those who don’t allow them .. sort of breaks the model.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: