Bonus: Good Password Management Practices Perhaps the single most important thing to remember when creating a new password is make the password hard to guess, but easy to remember. That s easier said than done, but follow some guidelines below and you will start using passwords that are more secure than what you re doing now. A good password is any combination of letters and numbers that cannot be found in a dictionary. Your password should be at least 6 to 8 characters long and should not have any personal information such as your name, child s name, occupation, telephone number, address or birth date. A combination of letters, numbers and symbols will work best. Make sure you use a mix of capital and lower-case letters to make your password even more difficult to crack. There are several techniques you can employ to make your existing passwords more secure. Whatever method you choose you should remember to make it an easy and understandable method so you will have stronger passwords without much more effort. 1. Use the first letter from every word in your favorite expression, or line in a story, poem or movie. For example, Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, could lead you to the following password: PnAttMBtC. 2. Choose a word as your password, but then substitute similar looking numbers for letters in your passwords. For example, Football may become F00t8a77 or sneakers may become 5n3ak3r5. Here is a sample list of numbers that could be substituted for letters: O 0 I 1 Z 2 E 3 H 4 S 5 G 6 L 7 B 8 You don t need to associate every number with a letter. What is important is that you remember your list of associated letters and numbers. 3. Choose a password that you want to use and then come up with a keystroke mapping system. For example, if you choose to do an upper-left keystroke system you would choose the letter to the upper-left of the actual key you wanted. So if your password was qwert (not recommended) your new password would be 12345 (also not recommended). If the word you wanted to use for your password was football, your keystroke password would be r995gqoo. It sounds complicated, but you need to look at your keyboard anyway, why not just choose the letter to the upper-left, left, or lower-right of the word you choose to remember. Bill Carey is the vice president of marketing at Siber Systems, a software company based in Fairfax, Va. The company produces RoboForm software, a password management and form-filling tool. The software can be downloaded for free at www.roboform.com.
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