10 Tips to Make Your Password Strong
In the era of Web 2.0 where more countries introduce digital signatures,
where there are more and more personal informations hanging around the net, one of prime task for anyone
is to minimise the risk of personal data thieft.
Now I want to show some tips for password creating, and we start from things to avoid.
The first advice is obvious, but surprisingly many people still do that mistake.
1.Do not use your username as your password
Some teenagers usually , when they get a list of users of mail company try to break in this way :
they type username@mail and username as password and see if they can logg in. If it doesn’t work
they try another user name up to the time when finally they find one.
Even without a list still one can try to guess
e.g.
…
user : damian
pass:damian,
user: mary
pass:mary,
…
and you can be surprised that that method still works.
2.Do not use a dictionary word
Another popular method of breaking in is to use the wordlist from a big dictionary like Webster
and try every word as a password. It sounds time consuming, but unfortunately there are some programmes that do it automatically.
The power of temporary laptop enables to check the full dictionary list within seconds.
The programmes can also check some variations with numbers
this kind of passwords were popular some time ago
like
orange1, orange 2 orange3…
or
oran2ge, oran3ge, oran4ge..
and so on
and although the password with a digit in is safer, but still not good enough nowadays.
3.Do not put any personal data into a pass
That means do not use your or your family’s birthday date, do not use a name of your pet or friend.
This kind of data can be easy guessed from various personal informations that anyone can obtain from the web
like C.V. or user’s profile pages, personal blogs, or doing some social phones to your company, asking neighbours etc.
4.Do not use the keyboard patterned pass
like typing the keys in the row
‘12345′,
‘98765′
or
‘qwerty’
also flower-type pattern:
‘edxzaw’
and similar
5.Do not write down the password
or you can write the part of it, or using the way described in
if you must wirite it , keep the paper safe.
6.Make the password longer than 10 signs
or make it even longer, if system allows you to do it, or if you can remember the longer pass
7.Do alter the case of the letters
but first check if system makes the difference between the upper and lowercase letter or treat them the same way.
8. Do add digits and special signs
Feel free to experiment which signs are accepted by the system as the password.
Thewn choose some keys you are not using very often like ‘&’ ,’^’ or ”!’, even the ’space’ key.
Also important is to know which sign exactly you are typing, think that in some case you will have to use
a keyboard different from the one you are familiar at home.
9.Change the password frequently
Well, yes I don’t like it either, I myself have the favourite phrases
but when I have to loggin in uncertain situation like in public place, or when I find a virus in PC,
after that I change my affected passwords just ‘in case’.
10.Do not use one pass for all your accounts
As when the thieve gains the access to one of your account, they will try this on other existing ones.
It is hard to remember all the different passwords, but you may change them a little, one or couple of letters with each password.
I hope you’ve found this post useful, soon there will be some examples how to choose the solid password.