God's Word can also protect you from hackers: Here's how it's done

 Reuters

We Christians very well know that God's Word saves souls. It turns out that the Scripture can also be used in our high-tech digital world to give us peace of mind.

Worrying about possible hacking threats to your email and other online accounts? Feeling unsure that the passwords you're using could be cracked by hackers?

The concern is indeed legit since hackers are coming up with new ways to correctly guess thousands of passwords. One of the techniques being used by hackers is called Brute Force, according to Gamma Tech Services. This is a computer programme that is able to guess passwords quickly by using words found in the dictionary.

Once a hacker gets hold of your passwords, a lot of terrible things could happen to you, including the loss of sensitive personal information.

The hacker's job gets easier if the password that needed to be cracked is fairly simple. Most Internet users are known to prefer simple passwords so that they could easily remember them when logging on to their online accounts.

So, how does God's Word come in to help you in this situation?

Gamma Tech Services provides a technique based on the Bible to make your passwords virtually hacker-proof, or at least very hard to guess. And the beauty of it is that it is not hard to remember, if you know your Scripture well.

The computer news website says a secure password has the following elements:

1. At least one lowercase letter;

2. At least one uppercase letter, preferably not the first letter only;

3. At least one number;

4. At least one special character;

5. Not comprised solely of an English word or combination of English words;

6. At least 12 characters long but preferably even longer—or up to 16 characters, which is the maximum allowed in some websites;

7. Don't use the same password on multiple sites.

Gamma Tech Services suggests a password format in a form of a sentence or phrase, taking the first letter of each word in that sentence and using it for the password. The difficulty here is in finding a sentence that meets all of the criteria stated earlier.

But the good news is that almost all verses in the Bible—either an entire verse or just part of a long one—can be used here. For example: Psalm 23:1 — "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want."

The password for this would be: P23:1-TLimsIsnw

It looks complicated but that password is easy to remember.

To make each password unique, you can just add a letter at the end or the beginning of the password to indicate the website where you intend to use it. For example, if the password is for your Facebook account, you add the letter F, so it is now P23:1-TLimsIsnwF.

Gamma Tech Services says making secure passwords may be tedious but it's worth the time and effort. It advises users to focus first on their email accounts as they are the easiest to crack. From there they can proceed to change the passwords of their social media and banking accounts.

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