It seems like every day another web site wants you to create a user name and password, then it’s your bank or credit union, your credit card company, your phones, how do you create a strong password for all of those accounts?
And yes, you need a different password for each account in case one account gets broken then you won’t have to change all your passwords.
Hackers have developed software to automate guessing or brute forcing your password. How do you defeat or defer that?
Minimum your password should be 8 characters, preferably 12, contain at least 1 number, contain at least 1 CAPITAL letter and 1 symbol.
Now how do you remember all these? Here’s a system.
The base for your password should not be something that can be easily guessed. So nothing you’ve posted about on Facebook or Twitter, your birth date, your wedding anniversary or your kids names.
Take a basic name you will remember, say you’re an Elvis fan. We start with a base of Elvis. Add some numbers, like the year of his birth 1935. Add an exclamation mark ! symbol. And add a suffix that will let you know which account the password is for. So your email password would 1935Elvis!email. Facebook could be 1935Elvis!Face , twitter 1935Elvis!tweet, and so on.
For banking and other really sensitive accounts, we need 15 characters. So we’ll add the year Elvis died to the mix: 1935Elvis!1977creditunion.
There are other systems, such as www.diceware.com . As long as you meet the complexity requirements and have a secure way of retrieving those passwords. There are several password keeper programs to help with that (just google or bing password keeper). Don’t store the password under the keyboard. And read my other post on how to secure your passwords.
