While there are a lot of authentication technologies available to the average consumer, usernames and passwords are still the most common form. This is why you needs to choose good passwords. But what is a good password? To start, anything that is easily guessed, which means anything in a dictionary, is not a good password. A modern home computer can go through all the words in a dictionary in a matter of minutes. Other things to avoid are birth dates, social security numbers, phone numbers, and names.
Okay, now that you know what not to use as a password, what should you use? A good password should be memorable, a minimum of 10 characters in length, and consist of numbers, special characters (&%$_, etc.), and both upper- and lowercase letters.
Let me guess, you're wondering how you're going to remember a password with all those numbers and special characters in it, right? Here's one way. Think of a phrase, it could be a favorite quote, bible passage, song lyrics, whatever. For this example I'm going to go with."'Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.' ~Clifford Stoll." Now take the first letter of every word,
TYPLYT.DLAEUI,AGANOESM.~CS
Now lets change some of those letters to similar looking numbers
7YP1Y7.D1A3UI,AGAN03SM.~CS (BTW, the "O" was changed out for a zero)
Some of the other letters can be switched out with special characters,
7YP1Y7.D1@3U|,@G@N03$M.~C$
And finally, lets have every other letter left be lowercase,
7Yp1Y7.d1@3U|,@g@N03$m.~C$)
Now you have a password containing each of the required characters and we can remember it, which, as I stated when we first started out, is the definition of a good password.
Do you have a trick for choosing secure passwords? Tell us about it in the comments.
Padlock picture by Garretttaggs (Own work) CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL, via Wikimedia Commons
