Gail On Tech

Creating strong passwords

With security threats becoming more and more sophisticated by the day, it’s more important than ever that passwords you use online are as strong as possible. Of course, the longer and more complex your password, the harder it is to crack. However, many sites do apply a length limit, so you will be constrained by that.

To create a strong password, you need to avoid any reference to any word or phrase that people can easily uncover — a pet’s name, nickname, maiden name, offspring’s name and so on. And don’t use any word that may appear in a dictionary, as many password decrypting programs use dictionaries as part of their password-cracking arsenal.

Similarly, you should avoid number combinations such as birth dates, phone numbers, postcodes, ages and the like. You may think that these details about your life are not readily accessible, but you only need to have made mention of any of these details on a site such as Facebook, and even if your Facebook page is locked down tight, those of your friends may not, inadvertently giving your information to their friends — people you don’t know from a bar of soap — or even people they don’t know who have just been trawling the site for likely victims.

If you have created a password using the above advice, but you’re still not sure of how strong it is, you can head to the Password Strength Checker. Just enter your proposed password, and it will tell you its strength.

Of course, if the letters and numbers mean nothing to you, you run into the problem of how you’re going to remember them. This can be overcome in a number of ways, including substituting any letters in a word you will remember with numbers that vaguely resemble that letter  — say, a zero for an ‘o’, a 3 for an ‘e’, a 5 for an ‘s’.

For example, if your dog’s name is  Rover, you could create a password such as R0^3r — you’ve used mixed case with the ‘r’s, substituted the ‘v’ with a punctuation mark (the caret mark is an inverted ‘v’), and the 3 looks like a back-to-front ‘E’.

You can also use the beginning initials of each word in a phrase or a line from a favourite song, using the same substitution method above.

If you have created a password using any of the above methods, but you’re still not sure of how strong it is, you can head to the Password Meter site. Just enter your proposed password, and it will tell you its strength, giving you a strength percentage score and a checklist of strength elements.

Password Meter

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