Creating and Using Safe and Secure Passwords

Most of us like to create our own passwords. Here are a few guidelines for this task when creating passwords for just about anything, most importantly, for your email account and other confidential logins.

The best password is one that's unassociated with you, the user, because a clever intruder who knows about you could possibly crack such a password. On the other hand, a password that has no association with the user may be eminently forgettable. Users solve this problem in a number of insecure ways, ranging from writing their passwords on post-its that they affix to their monitors to leaving notes in an unlocked desk drawer!

A good password contains upper and lower case alphabet characters and numbers, but no special characters (, . ; : * % & !). If you have difficulty remembering such an involved password, another suggestion is to merge unrelated adjectives and nouns, such as funnyclock or smartbottle. It's even more effective to use that scheme if you place a number between the words. A good strategy is to create the password out of the first letters of a phrase familiar to you and to intersperse numbers. Good examples would be a word such as firebomb as your password, only spell it this way: f1rE80mB

Passwords are case-sensitive. The longer the password, the harder it is to guess or crack, so six to eight characters should be your minimum length.

Following these simple guidelines will avoid you a lot of stress. We recently had a clients email account hijacked because their password was a simple 6 letter word with no uppercase, symbols or numbers. A spammer was able to blast off about 8,000 spam emails using this clients email address before our System Administrator found the issue which was picked up on when the server loads (processes running) were extremely high.

Feel free to follow these guidelines for your other personal items as well - it is a good habit to get into.