Breaches, scams, fraud, identity theft. These words are all over the news and, sadly, have affected millions of people. Unfortunately, these crimes will not be going away anytime soon. Therefore, this week’s blog will focus on another way you can protect yourself.Do you ever think about how secure your passwords are? You should. Passwords are vital in protecting your home computers, as well as your bank accounts and credit cards. Because of that, passwords can cause a fair amount of consternation if you have to remember so many of them.
One way to solve this dilemma is to develop a method/scheme to create passwords that are easy to remember, but hard for others to guess. Here are just a few suggestions for devising a password.
- Use a password scheme that contains characters that are the same across all of your passwords with other characters that are unique to the site you’re logging onto. For example, if you’re a dog lover and you use the stock symbol (or some other way to represent the company), you might come up with a password for Yahoo that’s "yhoodog2015."
- Use a passphrase and turn it into a password. "A Coke and a smile" could be "aCokeAndaSmile."
- Create a compound word using a couple of small words. "My dog Odie" might become "MyDogOdie."
- Take a word or phrase and remove the vowels from it. "Fly like an eagle" becomes "flylkngl."
- Pick a memorable word or name, as well as a number that’s the same length as the word and intermix them. "Kennedy" plus "1234567" is now "K1e2n3n4e5d6y7."
In addition to these suggestions, it’s always a good idea to mix upper and lower case letters in your password and add special characters (i.e., @, $, !, etc.) within the password to make it harder to guess or hack. Just do it in a way that’s easy for you to remember, like replacing each letter S with a $ or a 5. To make your password even stronger, remember that longer is better
The table below better illustrates how these methods can strengthen your password. It lists various passwords and the time it takes a hacker to crack them.
| Password | Time to Crack | Method to Strengthen |
|---|---|---|
| Password | < 1 second | No method |
| P@55w0rd | 3 days | Replacing letters with symbols and numbers |
| wbmidog01 | 7 hours | Company representation, a word, and a number |
| Wbmidog01 | 39 days | Same as above, but added an uppercase letter |
| 1Xa5jK@9# | 275 days | Random 9 character password |
| Du4*fB9$0t | 58 years | Random 10 character password |
| T4@nk$J04n@bil | 2 billion years | Using mixed case and replacing letters with numbers and special characters. (Says Thanks John a Billion) |
| K1e2n3n4e5d6y7 | 98 billion years | Intermixed letters and numbers |
As you can see, there are ways to create passwords that are easy to remember but hard for others to guess. If you do this, you won’t have to write them down on a piece of paper and stick it to your keyboard. What can you come up with?
Do you have any tips you would like to share? If so, I’d love to hear them. Please share them in the box below.
