Legal Marketing & PR

How To Choose Very Strong Passwords That Are Easy To Remember

By Larry Bodine, Esq.

What makes a password strong is the combination of different alphanumeric, special characters, and capitalization that you use, and of course the length of the password.

"I don't know about you, but I don't want to remember and type an epistle when I fill out a password field," says Dewald Pretorius of New Brunswick, Canada, who created the TweetLater service.  "And, ideally, I don't want to use the same password on many sites, because if one is compromised then my entire life is unlocked."

Pretorious shows us how to choose very strong passwords for every website that you use, that are different for each website, and are each only 9 characters in length max.

A study found that an 8-character password that's constructed in the following manner has 7.2 quadrillion different combinations, and will take 83.5 days to crack if the hacker can try 1 billion different passwords per second.

Step 1: Pick 2 Starting Characters

To make it easy to remember, all your passwords are going to start with the same characters. But these are not just any characters. Pick 2 characters from the list of special characters that you see above the numbers on your keyboard and to the left of the Enter key.

These characters are: ~ ` ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ - + = { } [ ] : ; " ' < > ? / | \

Pick any two of them as your password starting characters. To show you an example as you read through the steps, let's pick $ and % (pick your own two).
 

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Full post as published by Larry Bodine's LawMarketing Blog on April 28, 2009 (boomark / email).