1. By Stealing Your Passwords

This means looking over your shoulder when you type it or finding the notebook or paper where you wrote your password. This is probably the most common way passwords are compromised, thus it is very important that if you do write your password down you keep the paper extremely safe. Also, remember not to type in your password when somebody could be watching.

If your CCTV camera is not properly configured, then also hackers can crack into those cameras and if you enter your password in front of that camera then they will be able to find it out.

2. By Guessing Your Password

It's amazing how many people use a password based on information that can easily be guessed. Psychologists say that most men use 4 letter obscenities as passwords and most women use the names of their boyfriends, husbands, or children.

3. By Brute Force Attack

This is where every possible combination of letters, numbers, and symbols in an attempt to guess the password. While this is an extremely labor-intensive task, with modern fast processors and software tools this method is not to be underestimated.

A Pentium 100 PC might typically be able to try 200,000 combinations every second this would mean that a 6-character password containing just upper and lower case characters could be guessed in only 28 hours.

4. By Dictionary Attack

A more intelligent method than the brute force attack described above is the dictionary attack. This is where the combinations tried are first chosen from words available in a dictionary. Software tools are readily available that can try every word in a dictionary or word list or both until your password is found.

Dictionaries with hundreds of thousands of words, as well as specialist, technical, and foreign language dictionaries, are available, as are lists of thousands of words that are often used as passwords such as "query", "abcdef", etc.