How to create a really secure password

There is a real art to making sure your password is secure.

I know a man who knows your passwords. At least, he has a computer who knows how to find them. The computer also knows the next password you are going to create before you have even thought of it.

The problem is that humans are horribly predictable and will all follow very similar strategies when inventing passwords. Add that knowledge to the superfast processing power of modern computers and you have a recipe for disaster.

How not to pick a password

The first issue is the word itself. 'Password' tells us we should pick a 'word'. So we duly rack our brains for a secret word; but online dictionaries mean that no word is 'secret'. So the first rule is never use a real word as you password.

Dont think you can outsmart the baddies by changing a few letters into numbers. Most people will add a few numbers at the end of a password (howmany of us have simply added the number 1 to the end of a chosen word? Then some of us will swap 'L' with '1' or 'E' with '3'. Unfortunately the hackers know this and run programmes to check these variations. They know lots of others, like adding part of your phone number, your house address, the house number where you grew up, the birthdate of your child, your own birth or marriage date etc. Some people switch to foreign languages, and while this helps even this can be broken. We have heard of one program that looks at the target's surname and connects it to potential foreign languages. So, for example if hackers are seeking to crack Mr Sorenson's bank details their program will not only check english keywords and variant, but also Scandinavian ones too. All these methods are known and are checked very very quickly by hackers. The only way to effectively stop hackers finding your password is to make it absolutely incomprehensible to others. Keep reading to discover a good method for inventing safe passwords

How to pick a really secure password

Firstly forget about starting with a single word. Start with a phrase instead. However, a line from shakespeare or a song lyric is not good enough. ANYTHING that has ever appeared on the web is not good enough.

Instead, think up a sentence of 10 or so words that you will never forget but nobody else will ever guess.

For example "Uncle John was banged up in Pentonville prison for data theft." is a good 'unique' sentence.

We can now use the letter string "UJwbuiPpfdt" as the basis for our password. Add 4 or 5 numbers (but not a family related date or particularly famous year please) and drop them in at random. This gives us "UJw52bui3Ppfd33t" which should keep them guessing for a bit.

However, even so a password of this length might be cracked after some time, so changing passwords regularly where possible is a good idea. Another very good idea is to remember is never write a password down!

For more ideas on password security read this Wikipedia article.

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