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Paul Sawers
Paul Sawers was a reporter with The Next Web in various roles from May 2011 to November 2014. Follow Paul on Twitter: @psawers or check h Paul Sawers was a reporter with The Next Web in various roles from May 2011 to November 2014. Follow Paul on Twitter: @psawers or check him out on Google+.
Choosing an effective password that’s easy to remember and type, as well as hard to guess for would-be fraudsters, is a perennial problem. But it’s one that the folks at Microsoft Research are trying to tackle with an experimental tool called Telepathwords.
Armed with an arsenal of data on common passwords and password-setting habits, the team built a tool that detects how vulnerable your password is by trying to guess the next letter as you type it.
You can visit the project site for yourself and see how predictable your own passwords are. For example, if you think a clever password would be [email protected]$$w0rd, think again – the tool guesses it right instantly. If your password is zxserisljeerouiaer2345, on the other hand, its telepathic propensity flounders.
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