There are a lot of solution out their to help you keep track of and to make strong passwords for you online access to all of your sites. It is important to not only have strong passwords (ones that cannot be easily guessed) but also to have different passwords for each and every site that you access. That way if one is compromised then the rest of your secure sites are not compromised as well.
What Makes a Strong Password?
- It needs to contain special characters such as @#$%^&
- It must be at least 8 characters long.
- It must not have any common words such as 123, password, your birth date, your login name and any words that can be found in the dictionary.
- a variation of capitalization and small letters
For best protection every password you use should be unique and have the characteristics of what is a strong password listed above. You may be wondering how you are going to remember so many passwords when you have a problem remember just one! Try some of these tips in creating and remembering your passwords:
1. First, think of a thing, date, phrase, event, place or anything that is unique only to you. Make sure that it is at least 8 characters in length. What ever you come up with use this as the focal point for creating the rest of the password. Some people call this the salt phrase.
2. Many use the following to confuse the spelling by replacing certain alpha characters with specific special characters. You can come up with your own rules for doing this but commonly people use the following.
- Replace all the ‘a’ with @
- Replace all the ‘s’ with $
- Repalce any space with %
- Replace any ‘o’ with 0
- Replace any ‘i’ with !
3. Then for each site use either the site name or something about the site additionally added to your salt term. You can even vary the placement of the two parts to even make it more unique. Come up with some rules to use to help you remember and you will be on your way to a much safer online experience.