Password

From DarkGalaxy

Your password is the way into your account, if someone else knows it, it could lead to other people doing harm to your account and/or alliance. Here is a guide to make your password less hackable by other players.

Password Safety

Cracking a password is rarely done by using a brute force method, which tests all passwords. The brute force method tests "aaaaaaa" then "aaaaaab" then "aaaaaac" etc. However this would take time to do, assuming some piece of software was able to test 100 passwords every second, then it would take (on average) that computer roughly 26^7/200 seconds (assuming the password is 7 or less letters), which is about 1.5 years. If there are upper case letters and numbers in the password as well this time increases to 62^7/200 which is several millenia. Instead, modern software uses dictionary assisted attacks, trying various commonly used words in conjunciton with numbers and symbols to speed up hacking time.

With this in mind there are many techniques to make a password as secure as possible and near-invunerable to dictionary assisted attacks. A good password uses upper case AND lower case characters, some numbers (0-9) and some special characters (%, $,...). If you are paranoid, you can also use ASCII table characters (¥, Ð,...). A good password is composed of more than 7 characters. If you respect all of these conditions, it will take more than 360 days to crack the password using any of the above methods. The only problem with this kind of password is the speed it takes you to type it, but personally I always recommend using as many characters as possible for your own password as this exponentially increases the ammount of time required to brute force it.

Do not ever give out your password to ANYONE!!!

Safe Password Example

If for example you have the password "marie", you can change it to make it harder to crack. "marie" to "MaRiE", then harder to "M4R1E", then even to "M4R1E$". To then make the password more than 7 characters long, add something at the beginning or the end, such as "M4R1E$123%". Using this example will be nearly impossible to crack. The time it will take to crack it you will have already stopped playing the game, or at least changed your account.

If for any reason you manage your account on a public computer (school, cyber cafe,...) don't forget to erase EVERYTHING that could be used to access to your account (COOKIES, temporary internet files...). All these files can be erased using internet explorer: "Tools", "Internet options", then click on both "Erase Cookies" and "Erase files". The files arent actually erased however, sure they dissapear from the hard-drive and windows labels that space as empty, but the data is still there in memory and an experienced hacker could potentially withdraw that data and thus hack your account. Thus you should use professional tools to write random bytes to the address in memory where your cookies were stored, or, if you have sufficient experience, write such a tool yourself. It pays to play it safe.