How to Create a Strong Password (and Remember It)

[BABY1]

TweetYou can create strong passwords that don’t make you memorize a cryptic string of letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols. Here are three techniques:

Use a sentence. It’s easy to remember the first letters of the words in a sentence. For example, children have used this sentence to remember the names of the nine planets: My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles. You could use the first letters of those words to generate this strong 9-character password: m*Emjsu9p, where Venus (the morning or evening star) is represented by *, the letter for Earth is capitalized, and nine is a numeral. In practice, it’s best not to use such well-known sayings to generate acronyms.


Security expert Steve Gibson’s tips make passwords easier to retain.


Use a pass phrase. Several words mixed with numbers and punctuation symbols is known as a pass phrase. For example: stitch9clock^handsapplausE. The longer the pass phrase, the more secure it is, though you’ll be limited by the maximum length the site allows.

Growing the haystack. Developed by security expert Steve Gibson, president of California-based Gibson Research, growing the haystack takes advantage of the ways hackers crack passwords. “The first thing they’ll try is the well-known dictionary of most common passwords,” Gibson says. “Then, if they know something about you, they will try to guess things from your life.”

To foil that part of the process, Gibson suggests starting with a phrase that’s short but not a common word. That forces the hacker to resort to the slower brute-force approach by trying every combination in existence, which is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Once you’ve accomplished that, “the length of the password matters more than its absolute complexity,” Gibson says. In other words, make the haystack larger by padding the password with numerous easy-to-remember symbols. For example, the password “c - @T - - 9 - - -” is 10 characters long and is probably not in any dictionary, but it’s not very hard to remember.

A caveat: Don’t use any of the above examples as actual passwords. Now that they have been widely published, hackers might add them to their dictionaries.

[O2BESOHUGE]

TweetGOOD TIPS FOR SECURITY! THANKS BABY1!

[Dzone]

TweetThis is good information. I worry about someone hacking into my facebook or my email and sending out porn to everyone in my address book

[tiny]

TweetGood to see this post. There have been several accounts and boards hacked in recent months. It seems improved passwords are a must, especially for sponsors and mods.

[burlywood]

TweetThis is a very helpful topic baby1!!! I'll surely use this tips when change my passwords sometime soon.

I think the password length is already complicated enough for other people(hackers) to decode because the longer the length of password gets, the more combination of characters and number the hacker needs to try. Plus, using special characters is really something nice for password. Who would even think that about 70% of your password is actually some repetitive special characters with 1 or 2 letters and a number in it? It's also very easy to remember.

As for me, (I just want to share) I'm using the birthdays and other important infos, but not my info. Usually my friends' name, their birthday or their address but this takes me sometime to remember especially. It's easy to remember. It's not like my friends nor my family could ever know all my social interaction, right?