Creating Secure Passwords
The need for having good, complex, passwords has been discussed here before. Today I want to delve a little deeper in that topic.
You have probably noticed many sites now require complex passwords that contain both upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special symbols. By requiring all of these in your password, it makes it more difficult for your password to be cracked.
Now, let us take it a step further. Take the case of requiring a password to have at least on upper case letter, at least one lower case letter, and at least one number. Also, let us use the word “password” for the base. (Not a good choice in the real case, but this is just for discussion purposes.)
The majority of people will capitalize the first letter, and add a number at the end. Thus, “Password1”, would probably end up as the result in most cases. Let us improve on that.
First, capitalize a different letter, and not the “w” in “word”, as that is another obvious tact. Now we have something like “paSsword1”. A bit harder to crack. The next piece that I see, is that trailing “1”. While “1”, or “123” easy to remember, it is also easy to guess. Better to use a number that has some type of meaning for you that would not be common knowledge. The number of your favorite sports player, or the day of the month your child was born. Something along those lines give you a password that is easy for you to remember, while being much harder to crack.
Another thing that I would do for this example, is move that number from the end, to the middle. Therefore the result would be more like “paSs43word”, which is a pretty good basis for a secure password. Adding a special symbol such as “#”, “@”, etc., would make it even better.
Dave..