For years we've been encouraged to dream up weak passwords which are easy for machines to crack, concedes the guy who wrote the book on creating passwords.

We've all spent time staring at our keyboards, trying to think of yet another password containing a mix of upper and lowercase letters along with at least one number or special character. You can thank former National Institute of Standards and Technology manager Bill Burr, who came up with these rules back in 2003 when writing the password guidelines which many organisations now treat as gospel.

The traditional password rules encourage us to dream up terrible passwords. Credit:Reuters

It's a challenge to dream up memorable passwords which follow these arcane rules, so we tend to use tricks like 'p@ssw0rd1' – thinking that we're outsmarting hackers when we're actually playing right into their hands.

After a brute force password attack cycles through common dictionary words, it goes back and tries the obvious leet-speak tricks such as substituting '0' for 'o'. It doesn't take long to crack your seemingly uncrackable p@ssw0rd.