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Creating a secure password

Posted in Resources on July 30th, 2009 by Steve | 1 Comment

Today it seems that people are still not creating secure passwords to use. Everyone should be using a secure password whether its just for a social networking site, banking website, home computer or a personal e-mail account.

The reason for utilizing a different secure password for each resource is to ensure that attempts to gain access to any of your accounts are prevented. You may be thinking that this is something hard to do or that you may forget the password you created but for how many simple options (free and paid) there are today, this is no excuse.

Majority of websites today allow you to reset your password simply by entering in your e-mail or username. So even if you were to create a hard uncrackable password and did forget it, you can always get your information back or reset simply by doing this.

There are many different ways to store these hard to remember passwords that are uncrackable. Some of the applications out there that can store these for you such as the all mighty popular 1Password for OS X, RoboForm for Windows, KeePass for Windows and LastPass for OS X/Windows/Linux. There are other ways as well, like simply creating a text file on your computer. While this may not seem secure it usually is especially if you hide it well or name it differently.

You can generate passwords without an application by going to websites such as Secure Password Generator by PcTools or Password Generator by Bytes Interactive. There are many more on the web too which you can easily find by doing a search for "generate password."

Now that we have gone different ways to generate and store your password, also have the option to create a safe password. You don't need to rely on a password generator, but rather by using creating one on your own. To help you create your own password, I have created an example that you can utilize.

Pick 3 easy-to-remember words so that we can get started on creating a password. For example, say you love cooking, your boyfriend's name is Steve (or girlfriend, et al.) and your favorite number is 14. You can then combine the letters from those three words make a password such. My example password from 'cooking,' 'steve,' and '14' was sCtoeOvKEi14G. I put it into one in my own method to remember.

You should notice that not only did I make every other letter something different, but I also capitalized some of the letters to make it even harder for someone to guess. Even if you didn't utilize a method like this but, I highly recommend you capitalize some of the letters and use numbers as well.

Lastly, more websites are increasing their security measures. Some may allow you to fill in a field to where answer a question that you either created or selected from a list. While I do recommend you fill these out, I also recommend that they be difficult answers. For example, if the question were "What High School did you attend?", now a days this answer could be very, very easily obtainable especially with social networks like Facebook. You might want to answer it with something completely different that you will still remember.

Hopefully you have found this post helpful. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. Pass this on to those that you think may not have secure passwords especially family members. While you may not think it, people are out to get your information and secure passwords are vital in helping to ensure that does not happen. So make sure to change them if you have not already and do so every so often.

Just remember to be careful when creating your passwords, password question/answer, who you tell, where your store them and so forth.