Having a strong password is one of the keys to avoid cyber crime. A strong password can be your first fort to cyber crime. The question is, how to get to know that your password is strong enough?. A password strength checker tool is the answer. Although this tool can’t completely keep you away from cyber crime, it can at least lessen the risk your online account get hijacked.
The way a password strength checker works is actually simple. You will be prompted to type your preferred password, the tool then will display the strength indicators of your password.
One thing you need to notice before testing your password strength using this sort of tool, never type your real password.
Here are some online password strength checker tools you can use.
1. Kaspersky Lab
It’s easy to guess who is behind this password strength checker tool. Yes, it’s Kaspersky, one the most popular antivirus software companies. As displayed on the pop up message of its site, this tool is used for educational only. Which means, this tool is not intended to help you create password. The tool even also suggests you to not entering the real password. This tool will tell the strength level of your password in a nice way. Once you typed the password, the tool will say how long it take cracker to get your password using brute-force attack.
2. How Secure is My Password
How Secure is My Password is an open source password strength checker tool, released under the MIT License. If you don’t too trust to online password strength checker then you can build your own tool on your server. The way this tool works is quite similar to Kaspersky Lab. Once you typed the password you want to test, this tool will also says how long it would take someone to crack your password. It also checks against the top 10,000 most common passwords as well as a number of other checks (like repeated strings or telephone numbers). If you want to install this tool on your own server you can download the source code of this tool from GitHub.
3. The Password Meter
The Password Meter is a bit different to two first tools above. This tool won’t tell you how long it take cracker to crack your password. Instead, it will show the score of your password strength in percent. Each character you use on your password is given a score. For instance, if you use more uppercase letters, your Uppercase Letters score will also increase. And so on.
4. Password Strength Checker by Thycotic
Thycotic is a privileged access management software company. The company also provides an online password strength checker to help you figuring out how strong your password is. This tool comes with similar strength indicators as Kaspersky Lab and How Secure is My Password. In addition, the tool also lets you know where is the weak of your password by telling you the missed character type.
5. Password Strength Meter by my1login
My1login is also an access management software company just like Thycotic. The company also provides an online tool that allows you to gauge the strength of your password. The password strength checker provided by My1login comes with rich indicators. In addition to tell you how long it would take someone to crack your password, it also lets you know what type of characters you missed.
6. Password Checker by OnlineDomainTools
OnlineDomainTools is online resource where you can find several tools related to computer network. One of the tools provided by this website is password strength checker. This tool comes with rich of indicators, combining all indicators from all tools above. However, you will probably won’t too impressed by how this tool display those indicators. Password strength checker by OnlineDomainTools is not the best choice if you are sort of people who love tools with a fancy interface. But functionally, this tool is great.
7. Password Checker by LastPass
LastPass is a popular password manager software. It also provides an online password strength checker to allow you figuring out how strong your password is. Unfortunately, I have to say that this password strength checker tool is not as good as all tools above, functionally. This tool will only tells something like “Very Strong”, “Weak” or “Moderately Strong” without further indicators. I don’t say that this tool is poor. It will probably can be a perfect tool to compare the testing results with other tools.
These are all good password security checkers, and as I built my own password checker I learned a couple things that might be helpful.
1) Don’t ever put your real password in these password checkers. These are probably all legit, but you never know.
2) Don’t rely 100% on what a password checker says. It’s an algorithm. You still need common sense.
3) A strong password isn’t the end-all-be-all. If you can use 2-factor authentication, do it! If you can take advantage of a password manager app…do it!