No sane person would ever like someone else reading his or her email. Or for that matter some other person using her password and breaking into a financial institution. You should, therefore, choose a strong, secure password in such a manner that would be a hard nut to crack for others and easy for you to remember. The more random and mixed-up you make it, the harder it is for others to crack. Mind you, if your password is compromised, the password crackers will even take over your identity.
A password, if too short, is vulnerable to attack if an attacker gets hold of the cryptographic hash of the password. Present-day computers are fast enough to try all alphabetic passwords shorter than seven characters. We can call a password weak if it is short or is a default, or which can be rapidly guessed by searching a subset of all possible passwords such as words in the dictionary, proper names, words based on the username or common variations on these themes.
On the other hand, a strong password would be sufficiently long, random, or which can be produced only by the user who chose it, so that ‘guessing’ for it will require too long a time.
How to make a strong password
For maximum security, the user should follow some simple guidelines:
1) Passwords should preferably be at least 12 characters long.
2) Passwords should contain a mix of numbers, upper case & lower case letters, and special characters (%&3Ac_hT4@m7!).
3) Passwords should not contain a dictionary word from any dictionary, be it French, Spanish, medical, etc.
4) Each password should be different from the user’s User-ID and any permutation of that User-ID.
5) New passwords and old passwords should differ by at least 3 characters.
6) Avoid picking names or nicknames of people, pets, or places, or personal information that can be easily found out, such as your birthday, address, etc.
7) It’s wise to stay away from common keyboard sequences, such as dfgh678 or abc345.
8) Never form a password by appending a digit to a word. That can be easily guessed.
9) Avoid writing your password down or storing it on your computer.
10) Never share your password with anyone else.
Once you finalize your password, I’d recommend you use a service like LastPass or OnePass to keep your passwords secure.
Now that we’ve covered that, let’s discuss two amazing tools you can use to help create a secure password.
Free Password Generator
The first tool we’re going to cover is PasswordsGenerator.net which helps generate secure passwords for you and then will give you a phrase to help remember it.
You do not “have to” use the password generator but I do recommend that you test the strength of your password you want to use and never settle for anything below “Strong/Very Strong”.
Password Strength Checker
This is one of my newest additions to my “Best Free Online Tools” list!
PasswordMeter.com is (in my opinion) one of the websites everyone should use! It does a complete test on your password and will check the strength or complexity of your password. The stronger or more complex the password, the more secure!
I tested the password I got from PasswordsGenerator.net and you can see below how Password Meter will test your password.
Now you have the resources … So go get secure! :)
Keep in mind that the best way to be secure is to not have the password stored on your computer or written down in something that could end up in the hands of anyone but yourself.
If you cannot remember all of your passwords, that is totally fine. You can use an awesome tool called “LastPass” to store your passwords securely. Just follow this link and sign up!
I hope this has been helpful, if you have any questions please feel free to contact me.
