Can Microsoft Research predict your passwords?

Can Microsoft Research predict your passwords?

Here's a nice little tool that can keep you occupied this Friday afternoon and help you understand how hackers go about guessing passwords.

It's called Telepathwords, and it's been created by a team at Microsoft Research. It tells you how bad your passwords are by trying to guess the next letter as you type.

It uses real-world data — including passwords that have been made public by security breaches, and phrases commonly used online — to provide three 'best guesses' each time you enter a letter.

This reflects the kind of technique hackers might use when trying to guess passwords with brute force (basically, trying loads of passwords until they find one that works).

Once you've typed your whole password, you can see how many characters Telepathwords was able to guess. Five or more ticks above your password shows that it's reasonably strong.

Try Telepathwords now >>

More advice about passwords:

• How hackers target your passwords
• Are you using one of the world's worst passwords?
• Five ways to create passwords that are hard to hack