Update 17 Sep, 2017: Eric at Cloudwards emailed me recently to tell me of an excellent article on this subject that really covers a lot of ground. It’s long but worth the read if you’re concerned, or even just interested, in the security of your passwords. And if you’re not, maybe you should be:
My colleague James recently put together a pretty comprehensive piece on how to set up a strong password.There is a ton of information out there; our guide was designed to cut through the noise a bit. The post is here: https://www.cloudwards.net/how-to-set-up-a-strong-password/
Thanks, Eric. I also wrote about this more recently here:
Do you have a lot of passwords? Is the Pope Catholic?!? I use Access Manager to help me keep track of mine, but I still need a few passwords that I use frequently, and it’s bothersome to open Access Manager and retrieve them each time. But if you don’t use a software program that can create highly secure passwords, you are probably going to end up recycling the same old passwords amongst your various accounts. This is obviously not very secure. So I was glad to read this tip on Gary North’s website.
If you want a password that you can remember easily, but which is close to unbreakable, here is a secret.Forget about symbols, such as @#$%^, which you will forget. Forget about mixtures of upper case and lower case. KISS: keep it simple.But aren’t simple passwords more easily broken? Yes, but only because they are short.Pick a phrase or the lyrics of a song. Then…
via Password Trick / Gary North.
(Graphic from http://www.addressmunger.com/password_hasher/ a password hashing website.)
A colleague recently had his gmail account hacked. And then there was the famous case of Honan.
Then today, Gary North offered this tip:
pick the first letter of each word. Then add five periods, like this ….. or five forward slashes, like this /////.
It is easy to remember five periods or five forward slashes. But this will add so many characters that code-breaking software will bog down.
How about you? Do you have a secure and simple way of creating and remembering your frequently used passwords?
