Here’s a great tip from Ian about setting strong passwords for your (many!) logins.
Passwords are still where the rubber meets the road for the foreseeable future, but as computing power increases every year, they are more easily broken, so you are faced with increasingly complex password requirements. I thought this strategy from DUCOM’s IRT department in their weekly monitor was a good example of how to start with something normal that you can remember, and increase its strength as a password:
1) Start with something easy to remember. Then stretch it, if need be, to more than six characters: Passwords gain considerable strength if they are more than six characters long.
2) Add some “flair”: Throw in a couple of characters to further strengthen your password. You don’t have to use obscure characters; instead, trying putting parentheses around part of your password. Take it a step further with capitalization. Upper-casing letters is another way to add strength.
Here is an example of the evolution of a strong password:
OK password: jackbauerforcongress
Better password: JBFC2010
Excellent password: JBfc(2010)
And here’s another useful tip from Chris.
Come up with ONE good, complex and not especially long password, like “fR0%$” and then just substitute that password for, say, the second character in a common word which you change whenever you want to change your password. I’ve seen this suggested with shared passwords, like admin passwords. In this case, you could post whatever new password is needed on the wall of the systems dept and it would still be secure, as each staff member would know to replace the second letter with the real password.
So “Yellow” would be “YfR0%$llow”, “Blue” would be “BfR0%$ue”, etc.
