Passwords are a scourge of the internet. Annoying to come up with, annoying to remember, and often just a huge waste of time to have at all. But the passwords that protect your most vital information like bank accounts and personal emails are extremely important, and this demonstration of how password hacking works will scare you into making them very, very strong.
When you think of password hacking (or just guessing) you probably think of a "brute force" approach, one where computers just guess "aaaaa" and then "aaaab" and so on, but do it extremely fast. That is one way of going about it, but modern dictionary-based tactics are must more sophisticated and efficient, as this episode of Computerphile explains. That, and computers can guess very fast, tens of billions of times per second in some cases.
What can you do? Just pick the best passwords you can, for the accounts that matter anyway. Pick long ones with numbers and symbols and strings of characters that are not normal words. Better than any of that, turn on two-factor verification on any service that offers it. Those hackers know their stuff, and they'll only ever get better.
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