Wednesday, March 7, 2007

How to Create a Safe Password

It's easy to come up with hack proof passwords that are easy to remember. The one thing you must keep in mind is that sometimes companies limit the characters that you can use for a password. This is very silly on their part as the longer the password and the more options you have(upper and lower case, numbers, special characters) the more secure your password is.

Too often I've come across sites which limit my password to 8 or less characters, which don't distinguish between upper and lower case and don't allow for special characters. I recommend coming up with a simple alternative password algorithm for these sites.

The following is an example for an 8 characters password. I would recommend having longer passwords - at least 12 characters for those sites you are most concerned about.

1.Select a phrase — "It was the best of times"
3.Take the first letter of each word or number — IWTBOT
3.Change some letters to numbers — 1WTBOT
4.Add special characters — 1WTB@T

And now it is best to make each site's password unique. You can customize it by adding the first two letters of the site in lower case.

5.Customize by adding a prefix or suffix for each site you register with. For example your Blogger account would become 1WTB@Tbl. It makes remembering very simple: "It Was the best of times blogger"

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