The passive aggressive password strength meter

We’re all familiar with websites that try to help you choose a stronger password – grading it weak, average or strong.

By the way, they’re not always great judges of whether a password is really strong or not.

For instance, some password strength checkers consider any password with more than X number of characters to be strong, even if they are the same character repeated over-and-over again, or even if the password is 1234567890.

And some of the password strength checkers built into websites won’t check if your password is an obvious common choice like passw0rd.

Hopefully, by now, you have recognised that it’s better to get a password management utility like 1Password, KeePass or LastPass to generate random, complex passwords for you… and then remember them securely, so you don’t have to.

If you have configured those tools properly, you should never again experience a website being rude about the quality of your password.

But, if you hanker for the old days, you might like this.

PaP is The Passive Aggressive Password Machine, a neat website created by New York-based web designers Tim Holman and Tobias van Schneider.

What I liked about PaP is its caustic collection of putdowns which will happily insult the quality of your passwords until the cows come home.

Obviously, I don’t recommend entering your real passwords onto the site – but it is a bit of fun.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is an award-winning keynote speaker who has given presentations around the world about cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. A veteran of the computer security industry since the early 1990s, he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows, makes regular media appearances, and is the co-host of the popular "Smashing Security" podcast. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.