Password Protection: Strength in Numbers

Every thing has a password now, online or elsewhere. No matter what you do it seems that a password is needed a good majority of the time in this age of technology, especially on the internet. Unfortunately for us the internet is also the reason why passwords are now so popular. As far as password protection, if you password is not hard to guess or stumble upon then it is a sitting duck for predators. While it is true that many passwords are hard to guess, the idea of using a program to re try multiple passwords are not uncommon. These programs use words that are in the English dictionary and numbers and upper and lower case letter to try and filter out your password over multiple multiple attempts.

A truly great password is one that will or should never be able to be mentioned in common conversation or even better is the password that never leaves your lips. The password should also contain some mix of upper and lower case letter is possible and some form on number. This combination seems to slow down these multiple attempt programs to such a crawl that they are not even reliable for those who are running the program. My personal favorite is to add a bit of personal touch, when you hit the caps lock and hit a number a symbol is made, by adding a symbol or double symbol you are really complicating the password process. At this point many password attacks will be nullified.

another problem is the memory to remember this and possibly other passwords. For this I use a simple combination of two words, that mean something to me personally, and then I tag a number onto the end of the password followed by a double symbol. If possible I try to replace one of the letter with a number that looks similar to it. With this combination, passwords are so strong it would take multiple years to break the password. A good example of this password system is to place two words that mean something to you but have nothing in common with each other, and then pick a number.

Lets say you cats name is Missy, you have 3 children and you use to live in the town of Eagle Creek, but not any more. You could construct a password like "MissyEagle3" or "MissyCreek3", now to really change things up and keep things secure is to add some symbols that are easy to remember, since the number 3 is linked to the "#" symbol we can use that one. This combination will construct a password that looks something like "MissyEagle3##", this is a very secure password. It contains Upper and lower case letters, two symbol characters, and two separate words that cannot be easily matched to you.

Now you may be thinking that this is great and that you can use one password for all occasions, firstly you should never do this! By reusing passwords exactly from other places one breech in security is not only a complete security failure but a pain to reset all those passwords. At the same time you do not want to completely lose track of all the important passwords and forget them, so you can simply set up three levels of security, for online banking of financial information use the symbol for the number one, for semi-sensitive information use the number two symbol for the password and for the general lower security passwords use the number three symbol. This scheme for password creation would create; MissyCreek3!!, MissyCreek2@@, and MissyCreek3##, each symbol being different but the password is actually able to be remembered.

If for any reason you are not sure if the password you have created is a goo password, you can go to multiple websites that after you type in your password will test and rate the security of your password. Any of these web pages can be found by doing a simple Google search. By using this method of passwords you can simplify your password system and also keep you security at a high level.