We live in a password-driven world, weather it be your email account on Gmail or Facebook account, where words between four and 20 character are the difference makers in whether you’re able to access your data, communicate with friends, or make your online purchases. The problem is that passwords should be different everywhere when you use them, and that can make it difficult to remember them all. And, if a password is truly strong, that makes it even more difficult.
Why Use Different Passwords Everywhere?
Why would you do this when it’s so easy to just type “test” at every password prompt? Here’s why: If “test” gets cracked once, it means the person with that info now has access to all of your online accounts. A study by a security company showed that 75 percent of people use their e-mail password for Facebook, as well. The saying goes like this: You should change your password often (okay, maybe not every day). Don’t share them. Don’t leave them out for others to see (no sticky notes!). Password should be mysterious. In other words, make your password a total mystery to others.
Avoid Common Passwords
If the word you use can be found in the dictionary, it’s not a strong password. If you use numbers or letters in the order they appear on the keyboard (“123456” or “qwerty”), it’s not a strong password. If the word is your name or number , it’s not strong enough either, even your date of birth isn’t. These are all things hackers would try first. They write programs to check these kinds of passwords first, in fact.
What Are Strong Passwords?
Basically passwords with more than 6 characters are considered strong enough provided they contain a mixture of numbes(0-9), small-case characters(a-z), capital-case characters(A-Z) and at least one special characters from (_, space, %, ., etc.). Some times you may not be able to use these special characters in a password, but as the security issues are growing, major sites are letting their users use these characters as well.
Having Trouble Remembering Strong Passwords?
Very often people complain because they are not able to remember their long and complex passwords like ‘Yx4%n1C’. You can call that a strong password , but is it easy to remember it? No, as most of you would say. So, here are some points that you can keep in mind the next time you make a password.
- Use a name of something that you like, say your pet’s name,
- Keep the first letter capital and others small or vice-verse,
- Add any number that you like either in the beginning or the end,
- Add a special character at the opposite end,
- And another name or the initials of your name in the end.
Keeping in mind the above tips lets make a password. For e.g. lets take the pets name as ‘jimmy’, and using it I would come up with something like ‘911Jimmy.AG’ or ‘.jIMMY12KS’. Now this isn’t that difficult to remember but yes, it’s a lot more secure.
These aren’t the best tricks to make a secure password, but they do come at handy when you don’t want to use too much of efforts making a complex password and not forgetting it the next time when you have to use it.