Cyber-age 'open sesame' can be so easy to decipher

How safe is your password? Just try to crack Technopedia's. It comprises the Klingon for modem deconstructed by an online code-scrambling machine then swallowed and spat out by the translation engine Babelfish and supplied with a tilde or two for added obscurity.

This may appear paranoid but it pays to have an offbeat password in an age where information has become a precious possession. The value of information stored on your computer or network can vastly surpass the cost of hardware.

Accordingly, hundreds and thousands of wayward strangers are trying to break into computer systems worldwide every minute of every day.

So how do you come up with a good password? Beware complacency because any noun, verb or adjective you care to mention can be cracked easily enough via a fiendishly simple, devastating method known among the knowing as a dictionary attack.

To the uninitiated this term may suggest a literal rendition of the expression throw the book, meaning rebuke, and if you wanted to extract a password from someone, pelting them with dictionaries might well work. Rather, dictionary attack means a time-tested method of violating password security.

The villain responsible is a bot (an automated program that can execute a repetitive task). The bot tries to establish the password for a known user ID by drawing on two resources.