IT’S VERY EASY to settle for a password that’s simple to remember, especially since we now signed up to more services and apps, but that convenience usually comes at a price.

Passwords like ‘qwerty’, ’1234567′ and ‘abc123′ tend to be so weak that it would take a hacker less than 0.25 milliseconds just to crack it, according to BestBuys, and you can test the strength of some passwords to see how good (or bad) they are.

Using processor data from Intel and the password cracking tool John the Ripper, it’s able to calculate how quickly someone would be able to crack your password, and how much that will likely change over the years (answer: it will likely be easier to crack).

It’s better for testing out the strength of potential passwords or variations of the one you’re using to see if they’re better or worse.

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As a way of entering in passwords quickly, many tools use the ‘brute force’ method to crack accounts. That is a tool which generates hundreds or thousands of guesses in seconds in the hope of cracking an account.

Such tools use the most common passwords revealed from previous hacks as well as words from the dictionary to guess the correct answer.

If you suspect that your password isn’t up to scratch, there are a few simple things you can do to improve it. Length is an important factor as shorter passwords are far easier to guess, and including different characters, numbers and symbols can help matters and set up two-step verification on your accounts.

Doing all of this won’t make your account completely secure – there’s no such thing at 100% security – but it will make it much harder for someone to crack it.

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