Make your passwords unbreakable but memorable

Criminals are very good at cracking simple passwords. Take the recent case at Twitter.

A number of high-profile accounts were hacked. These accounts belonged to various public figures, including Barack Obama. Some embarrassing posts were made in their names. But none of these people were at fault.

A Twitter employee’s account was hacked. This gave the criminal full access to administrative tools. It wasn’t hard to do. The employee’s account had a simple password, “happiness.”

This password is a great example of what not to do. It’s fairly short. It only uses lowercase letters. And, worst of all, it’s a dictionary word. Passwords out of the dictionary can be cracked in minutes. They are the first passwords criminals try.

Create a better password

So, what makes a password strong? There are a couple key features you should remember.

• Avoid names and dictionary words
• Use at least eight characters; the more the better
• Include upper and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols

A strong password should look like random characters. In fact, a truly random password is the strongest available. Unfortunately, you probably won’t remember a randomly generated string of characters.

Such a password could look like this: IwIhl@M$bi86. So, how do you make this memorable?

The answer is surprisingly simple. And it’s a trick that you can use for all of your passwords.

Start by thinking of a meaningful sentence. It can be anything you want. It could be a favorite song lyric, famous quote or catchphrase. Or it could just be something you made up. Here’s my example:

I wish I had looked at Microsoft stock back in 1986.

From here, building a random looking password is easy. Simply take the first character from each word. In my case, this results in “IwIhlaMsbi1.” Not bad. It has enough letters, mixed cases and a number.

But to make it stronger you’ll also want to add symbols. That’s easy, too. Just swap out a few letters for similar symbols. Now, my password looks like this, “IwIhl@M$bi1.” And I’ll change around some numbers for good measure. And we get my final password:
IwIhl@M$bi86

Use multiple passwords
This password is very strong. It’s doubtful that criminals could crack it. Or at least, it would take way too long. And it wouldn’t be worth their time.

But nothing is foolproof. You don’t want to use the same password for everything. If you do, once one account is compromised, all are compromised. So, use different passwords. But again, remembering all of those passwords isn’t easy. Luckily, there are several simple solutions.

You could try a password manager. These programs store all of your passwords in an encrypted file. You only need to remember one password to access them. Try KeePass, LastPass or Pageonce.

You could also modify your one strong password. Add or change a few characthttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifers for each account. Say, you have a Gmail account and Amazon account. You’ll use the original password as the root. And then, you’ll add characters related to the service.

For Gmail, I’d use IwIhl@M$bi86Gm
For Amazon, I’d use AmZIwIhl@M$bi86

Obviously, these are not really my passwords. But using a system makes it easy to remember all of your passwords.

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