How To Create A Good Password

A strong password is important for online protection and transactions and will protect your email accounts, social network profiles and so on. Until sci-fi movie type retina and fingerprint scans are affordable and fully integrated into people’s lives, password protection is the safest online protection. As your password is your key to your account, you need to safeguard it otherwise anyone who has your password can access your account and your personal files.

What to do?

Avoid creating passwords that use:

• Dictionary words in any language.
• Words with a single character before or after it I.e. (“8dinner”, “happy2”);
• Word, capitalized (dinner > Dinner, happy > haPPy)
• Words spelled backwards, common misspellings and abbreviations.
• Sequences or repeated characters. Examples: 12345678, 222222, abcdefg, or adjacent letters on your keyboard (qwerty).
• Do not choose a password based upon personal data like your name, your username, or other information that one could easily discover about you from such sources as searching the internet.
• Don’t just garble letters, e.g. converting e to 3, L or i to 1, o to 0

How to choose a good password?

• Choose a password that is at least 8 characters long.
• In general, a good password will have a mix of lower- and upper-case characters, numbers, and punctuation marks

Let’s see some ideas of how to create a password:

• Put a punctuation mark in the middle of a word, e.g., “vege%tarian”
• Choose two or more unrelated words such as: august & brick; Join the words with a non-alphabetic character or two and make at least one change. The result should be something like this: august,=bRICK

• Make up a sentence you can easily remember. e.g.: “I have two kids: Jack and Jill.”
• Now take either the first, seconds or last letter of every word in the sentence, and include the punctuation. You can throw in extra punctuation, or turn numbers into digits for variety. The above sentences would become: Ih2k:JaJ.
• The passwords generated by this method can be fairly secure, but are easy to remember if the sentence you pick is one that is easy for you to remember.
• Lengthen your password by adding the website name or computer software name to the base phrase. For example: cstftttGmail
• The best practice is to use several of the techniques above.

Additional tips:

• NEVER give your password to anyone.
• Make your password something you can remember. Do not write it down!
• Rotate, change your password regularly
• Use password generator software. It may create good passwords, but difficult to remember.
• Use 2-step verification if available. For example Google and Dropbox offer this option. To learn more check Gmail’s 2-step verification here.