Creating Better Passwords


by Matt Krautstrunk - Date: 2010-10-11 - Word Count: 487 Share This!

Passwords are the bane of many in the business world because they are always something which the IT guys say that the company is not taking seriously enough. Security assessments always have the staff coming up short on the passwords that they are creating. It makes you wonder what they consider to be a good password.

You have tried everything from using old girlfriend's names along with different historical dates and still they say you are coming up short. So, what can you other than have the computer come up with something that you will not be able to remember and have to write down on a piece of paper (another security risk)?

There are some really good suggestions which will help you to come up with a secure password which will be much more difficult to crack. It starts with not using any words which can be found in any language. This is because a simple code program will run through all known words with various capitalizations first. It will also run through combinations which will include known historical dates. This is because these are all known variances that people will try when attempting to come up with a good password.

Capitalization is key
One of the first things you will need to know is that when you are coming up with a password that you will have to flow between upper and lower case letters. This is because all passwords are case sensitive and if you jumble them, it can have the effect of making it more difficult to crack a password.

Length matters
Another thing to remember when coming up with your password is that the longer it is, the more difficult it will be to crack the password. Security professionals will recommend you use something around 14 characters long. There are limitations like on some business security systems, you might only be able to enter 6 characters. Make the password as long as you can to increase difficulty of the algorithm that password crackers will need to use.
Know a good limerick?

In order to create something which will be truly difficult to crack, come up with a sentence which is meaningful to you and use the first letters of each word. Vary the cases for letters in the password and sprinkle in significant numbers to you. What you will in essence have is a password which will look a jumble of letters and numbers to anyone else, but will be meaningful to you.

Those in charge of the office security systems will suggest that you constantly change your passwords in order to maintain better security. If you like limericks, you can keep a book of them which will look whimsical to all others who see it, but will represent your code decoder for you. You can simply highlight the ones you are using so that you will remember the one that you are currently using in the computer system.

Related Tags: computers, security, passwords, office security systems, business security systems, security assesments

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