Selecting Good Passwords For Safety

In the business of being you, you must understand that anyone with the right software can guess poorly chosen passwords in minutes. Do you want to know how? Software tools which “understand” how people typically select passwords are on the market. For example, since we can’t remember passwords or don’t want to remember random strings of characters, we might select a password based on something we care about, birthdays, last names, wife’s maiden name, cell phone number, and then adding a digit or the current year to the end. Maybe the word “password” or a name spelled backwards will do the trick, I doubt it. Sadly, behaviors like these are highly predictable, and thus the passwords we tend to pick can often be guessed in minutes by password cracking software.

The best password comes down to avoiding the kinds of character string patterns a cracker’s software will be looking for, while still coming up with something that you can remember without having to write it down. The following information below is to help you pick a password which you can remember, but no one can guess. Check out the do’s and don’ts.

What Not to Use

Don’t use a password shorter than ten characters.
Don’t use a password of all digits, or the entire same letter.
Don’t use your child’s name, pet’s name, or significant others name.
Don’t use any short word or letter pattern repeated two or three times.
Don’t use your username any kind of way, reversed, capitalized, doubled, etc.
Don’t use other PII information such as, telephone numbers, zip codes, social security numbers, birthdates, the name of the street you live on, etc.
Don’t use the name of any person or place, either real or fictional, no matter how obscure it seems to you.
Don’t use any word (person, place or thing) followed by or preceded by a single digit or punctuation mark.
Don’t use any word spelled backwards.

What to Use

Do use a password that you can type fairly easily and quickly. This makes it harder for someone to steal your password by watching over your shoulder.
Do use a password with both upper case and lower case letters.
Do use a password with at least one number.
Do use a password with alphabetic characters, e.g., digits and/or punctuation marks.
Do use a password that you can remember, so you don’t have to write it down.

Easy to remember passwords

My method for selecting a password is as follows:

Think of a phrase. We will use making new as an example.
Randomize the capitalization of some letters. We now have MaKing New.
Replace some of the letters with similar numbers, symbols, or sequences of both. We now have MaKin8$N3w!

A password can be compared to the key to your home or office. If you came home to see your valuables missing with a thank you note, stating thanks for the easy access, you would be frantic. You probably don’t want to come home to find all of your expensive electronics and jewelry stolen. For some bizarre reason, people leave the key to their front door right under their doormat or up on the door ledge. It just doesn’t make good common sense. Equally, choosing a weak password doesn’t make good sense either.

http://www.makingusmile.net

Mr. MakingUsmile

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