How to Write a Good Password
Making passwords is something everybody on the web does. The art is in making good, secure passwords that you can also remember easily. There are two methods I have found really effective. There are tons of passwords I use that I have to be able to recall at any time. Most people would resort to making short passwords, writing passwords down, or using the same password for multiple things, these methods are horribly insecure.
The first way I have found very effective is to use phrases or sentences. The phrase should be something rememberable and contain numbers too. One example of this would be something like, “ilovemy1995thunderbird”, (I love my 1995 thunderbird). This is 22 characters long, and pretty easy to remember. The phrase should be something that makes sense to you. So maybe if you were born in 1942, instead of resorting a typical password, which would just use your birthday and are guessable, turn it into a phrase like, “iwasbornin1942″, now you have a hard to guess, long, and easy to remember password. This method is also very effective for passwords that have to be shared with others, using phrases will make it fairly easy for even forgetful people to remember.
My second method I commonly use for passwords is good to use on websites that you might not use a lot, and therefore are prone to forget the password. What I will typically do with such a site is use a combination of the site name in a phrase. So with a site such as yahoo you could have a password such as “ilikeyahooalot”, or for google maybe something like, “googleisreallygreat”. Using this method you can also use it as a pattern so for attackr.com, using the previous pattern it would be “attackrisreallygreat”. It is good to note that if you use such a pattern it would be potentially possible if someone discovered one of your passwords to guess the others. However, this is fairly unlikely and better than reusing the same password over and over again, but not quite as secure as the first method.
Well I’ve used these methods fairly successfully for a while now and they have been a big help to me. I hope they are of use to you too, enjoy. Originally posted at graystatic.net/blog
February 25th, 2009 at 9:33 am
Thanks.. Will do that..