Some might wonder why bother creating a beginners guide to creating a password, until you find out that so many people still use “password” as their password, it’s down right embarrassing for the whole human race.
With that in mind, how can you create a good password?
Password Length
The longer the password, the better. That’s because you are not dealing with a nefarious person who is just typing in one or two random passwords from the list of common passwords.
No, hackers use computers to randomly try different passwords, some from list of known passwords, others just randomly trying them until they get in. Using powerful computers, or even bot nets (groups of computers working together often by means of a virus that the users don’t even realize they have) to get into your system.
The longer the password, the harder it is for them to crack.
I knew a group that had a long password. It was based on the sentence, “This is a long password.”
Given the length, it would take a while to brute force crack it. But since it used words that logically went together, it wasn’t the best choice either.
Capital Letters
Adding capital letters at random places will make it harder to guess. There are a couple of variations on this such as:
- Every First Letter Of A Word,
- EvErY oThEr LeTtEr,
- etc.
Every first letter is easy to remember, but once again creates and easy to guess pattern, but so does every other letter. So this should be used in conjunction with other methods.
Number/Symbol Replacement
Replacing letters with a number or symbol that looks like the letter increases the complexity. For example, the letter o (“Oh”) could be replaced with a 0 (zero). L can be replaced with a 1 (one), ! (Exclamation Point), | (Pipe), etc.
Here are some other common replacements:
- A – @ (at symbol)
- E – 3 (three – the mirror image of the letter)
- L – 7 (upside down mirror image), or 1, !, | (especially for lowercase L)
- S – 5 (five), $(dollar sign)
- G – 6 (six) as the lower case version is closer resembled.
- O, 0 (zero), * (asterisk/star)
Put these together, and our “This is a long Password.” can transform into “ThisI$ALongP@ssw0rd!”. It’s relatively easy to remember as a phrase, you just have to remember where your substitutions are.