In my last post I talked about how safe is your password and pointed out several popular yet easy to hack of them. Understanding your concern on how to write a secure one, here is five tips on how to create a secure password that you can actually remember in five easy steps.
No Personal Information
Any novice hacker can easily find out your full name, the names of your spouse or children, your pets, or your favorite sports teams. Never choose a password that has anything to do with you personally.
No real words
Let’s take that a step further. Not only should you not use your name or your pet’s name, you shouldn’t use any actual word that can be found in a dictionary. Passwords like that can be easily cracked by password retrieval software via ‘brute force’ method.
Mix Character Types
Passwords are almost always case-sensitive, so use both upper and lower case letters to make it more difficult. To really make it complex, be more creative than just capitalizing the first letter. For example, do “paSswoRd” instead of just “Password”. Better yet, throw in some numbers and special characters to substitute for letters, and do “p@Ssw0Rd”.
Use a Passphrase
Scratch that. Some password cracking utilities are also smart enough to use common character substitutions for common words. Cracking “p@ssw0rd” may take longer than cracking “password”, but it will still be relatively trivial to crack because, special characters or not, the password is still “password”.
Instead, take your favorite line from a movie, song, or book and convert it to a passphrase. If you like the scene from A Few Good Men when Jack Nicholson is on the stand, take the line “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” and convert it to “Ywtt?Ychtt!”. It has upper case and lower case letters, as well as special characters. It is not a word appearing in any dictionary, yet it is simple for you to remember.
Use a Tool
The main reason that users choose passwords that are easy to crack is that they want to choose passwords that are easy to remember. It is obviously much easier to remember your dog’s name, or type characters in the order they appear on the keyboard, like “123456″, than it is to recall “a5$jgFD118@Kle45@”. But, guess which one is more secure?
You can use a password management tool to store complex passwords. It has some impact on security since cracking the password to access the password management tool grants access to all the rest of the passwords, but it does enable you to use stronger passwords for various Web sites, accounts, and applications without having to remember them all.
Windows has included a Credential Manager utility since Windows XP that lets users save passwords and provides a single sign-on solution. Logging in to Windows unlocks the vault and automatically applies the credentials from the vault as needed to access sites and applications.
With all that mentioned, why wait while you can get it done right Now! And do remember to pass this piece of information to the ones that you always held close.
Related posts:
One Comment on "Tips to Create Secure Passwords"
[...] Go here to read the rest: Tips to Create Secure Passwords | TECHNOVATION NEWS [...]