| Secure Passwords |
| Articles | Security |
The biggest single online security risk to any individual or business remains that of having weak, easily guessable passwords. Many people use the "too many passwords to remember" argument, so here is a great tip for having a secure password system, which is still easy to remember. The biggest single online security risk to any individual or business remains that of having weak, easily guessable passwords. Many people use the "too many passwords to remember" argument, so here is a great tip for having a secure password system, which is still easy to remember. Secure or strong passwords are those that contain lower and smaller case letters, and numbers. Of course usually the more complicated you make your password the harder it is to remember, especially when you have all your work passwords, your email, online banking and ebay passwords, if you don't stick to the same one it is easy to get confused. The system I use is very simple, and guarantees I will never forget a password again. First of all I have a core phrase which forms part of every password. In order to make this as strong as possible I use a mixture of lower and upper case letters, and numbers. When I first started to use this system I had problems remembering my core phrase, which in turn of course meant I could no longer remember my passwords. To counter this I suggest using a mnemonic from one of your favourite songs. Using the first letter of the first several words of the chorus or introduction to the song gives you an easy to remember but difficult to guess password. As an example let's take The Beatles, Let it Be. What I would do is take the first eight words of the song, "When I find myself in times of trouble," if you take the first letters of each word you get wifmitot. Now in order to increase the security we need to introduce some capital letters and numbers. Of course most passwords have the first letter as a capital, so for something more secure you might want to make a different letter your capital, or have more than one. In order to introduce numbers into the password the easiest way is without doubt to replace some of the similar looking letters with their numerical counter parts. So, we take wifmitot and make it into wifm1t0T. Now, to come up with our system which adapts to all we introduce the same placed letter from the service for which we want to create the password. So, if you decide that the last letter of the first word will be your wild card letter it would make your ebay password wifm1t0Ty and your hotmail password wifm1t0Th. Of course use of this system means if somehow someone does get hold of your system they would then know ALL of your passwords. To counter this I use several different keyphrases for different types of password. So all my banking etc uses a different keyphrase to my email clients. |