GordonH
20 answers
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Advice on passwords

I need a new password that will be strong enough for people not to guess, but easy enough for me to remember. i don't want to write it down. can you recommend a good way to make a password up?

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bassam
1 answer
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As previously mentioned, it's not a good idea to have the same password on many sites, since if the password for one site is compromised, all of the other sites with the same password become compromised too.

 A nice idea is to use a single password that's easily remembered by you, and "salt" it with the name of the web site or application you're using it with.

"Salting" a password means inserting extra characters into the password to make it harder to guess.

So, you start with a password that you can remember. Say your son's name is Isiah. You may want to play with the capitalization, and maybe insert some numbers and symbols too.

Suppose I choose my password to be !s1aH (just replace the first i with a !, and the second i with a 1, then capitalized the H).

Now, say I need to create a google password. My salting method could be as simple as alternating characters between the name of the site and the password.

Result for google: g!oso1galHe.  See... impossible to guess.
Result for yahoo: y!ash1oaoh.

 

Or, you could alternate three characters at a time:

google: goo!s1gleaH
yahoo: yah!s1ooaH

 

You can use any strategy you like. This way, you get impossible to guess passwords unique to each site/application, but only one password to remember.

Hope that helps!

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shlomper
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keep it real.

The rules of thumb I know about say that strong passwords are those ones where you combine both letters and numbers, and the longer the better - it should be at least 8 characters long.
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romano
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A method I use is random names and numbers. I take the initials of two friends of mine and 4 numbers from someones birthday - and mix them up like this: a1b2c3d4. it's really easy to remember.
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ZoeB
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I sometimes use another method: take a line from a song you like and use the first letter of each word. The result is a meaningless word that's very hard to crack. For example, if you like the line "When you were asked if we were sisters you replied you weren't sure" (from Yo La Tengo's "Madeline") use it to create the password "wywaiwwsyryws" that you're not likely to forget and no one else is likely to crack.
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why not go for 1234? it's so easy people never use it.
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GreenFrog
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That's terrible advice. You not only reveal sensitive information (part of your SSN), but also use the same password for all services (assuming you don't have many pets...). So if just one of these websites is hacked or has an evil admin, all your accounts are compromised.
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