So how can you keep your password secure? First, let me say what YWS does.
On YWS, your passwords are encrypted in MD5 hash format. Say your password is password1 (which is the most common password on the net). When checking to see if you typed the right password, YWS first converts password1 into MD5, and it comes out with 7c6a180b36896a0a8c02787eeafb0e4c. If that hash matches the one in the database, all good! By the way, it doesn't work if you try 7c6a180b36896a0a8c02787eeafb0e4c to begin with as YWS would convert that to its MD5 hash equivalent, which would be: 816b09aa255516ec745de7b215e2e158.
Even though YWS has never been hacked, other sites are regularly and most use MD5. Unfortunately MD5 isn't as secure as it used to be. Hackers are getting good, which is part of the reason YWS will be changing early next year. The new YWS has a more secure encryption method that is just about impossible to crack.
Even so, if you follow some general principles, your password will be all but impossible to crack:
- 1. Use lower case and upper case letters
2. Use symbols like $, %, ^, and *.
3. Use numbers
4. Should be at least eight characters long.
5. Mix it up. Instead of jordan23, use jor23dan.
You don't need to follow all the principles above, but follow at least three.
To check if your password is good, type it into Google. If you get 0 hits, awesome! Any more than that though and you should change your password.
You should also strongly consider having four or five different passwords. For me, I have a simple password that I use for sites like logging into washingtonpost.com. But for e-mail, I use a stronger password, and I use an even stronger password for YWS (if someone were to hack my account, it could be devastating). Then for my online bank account, I use a very, very strong password.
And they 
