Welcome back! Today we will look at the lifeline of your personal data – your password. Now it can be painful and cumbersome to work with passwords but it’s important to have a strong one because hackers can breach your accounts really easily. The tools that are available at their disposal are so powerful that they could break into your account within a matter of minutes.
One of the techniques that hackers use is called a “brute force” attack. This is where they through the entire dictionary, word by word, to figure out your password. Now of course they use a computer program to do this so it only takes a matter of minutes to do and retrieve your password. If your is a very simple password that can be found in the dictionary like computer or banana or airplane, chances are it will get found out by the hacker. So it is important to come up with a strong password.
A strong password consists of the following:
- It must have at least one capital letter
- It must have at least one number
- It must have at least one punctuation marks such as a pound sign also known as a hashtag, exclamation mark, period, comma or question mark.
- It must be at least 8 characters long.
Now these rules don’t have to be so daunting. In fact, you could easily come up with a system for yourself to remember a bigger and better password. Lets look at a way to come up with one for you. Start by thinking about a few things that are personal to you that others may not know about. For example, suppose I like baseball and my favorite player was a Toronto Blue Jay from the 1980’s, Jimmy Key. I have a number of possibilities here so I could go with for part of my password. I could go with where Jimmy or Key or I can go with Toronto or Blue or Jays. I’m going to pick “key”. Now that’s only part of the equation here, I need a number to go with it and I should try and avoid obvious ones like a 99 or 98 so how about 65? So now I have “key65”. Lets satisfy the third characteristic with a hashtag so now we have “key65#”. Now all we’re missing is a capital letter. How about making the second letter capital so now we have “kEy65#”. This is a strong password but we still need to make it greater than 8 characters. Since Jimmy Key was a Blue Jay, lets use “bird with the second letter capital so “bIrd”. So now we have “key65bIrd#”. Finally, lets add another number for completeness like 64 since its close to 65. So now we have “kEy65bIrd64#”.
The trick isn’t to come up with a strong password, its to come up with memory tricks to remember that password. If we can’t remember the password then we’ll just end up resetting our password all the time and this exercise will get frustrating. Notice how I reasoned my password and now every time I use this password I will think baseball.
A friend of mine has another trick that you could use. He adds something about the site that the password is used for to help remember. So for example if you are trying a new password for Yahoo Mail. Maybe use Yahoo backwards such as “oohay”. So we could try a password like “kEy65oOhay64#”. Then if we had a Gmail account we could change the password to “kEy65eLgoog64#”.
Other memory tricks might involve using the name of that your child if you have children or a spouse or a close friend or relative or better yet, their nicknames. A name might be obvious but a nickname or a middle name won’t be.
Now there are some sites who don’t allow punctuation marks. I can think of 1 bank that doesn’t which its unfortunate. So drop the punctuation mark for those sites. So long as you follow the other rules, you should have a strong password.
So there you have it, some small and simple rules for putting together a strong password to protect your online info. Until next time, happy surfing!