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Just a couple of weeks ago Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin had her email address hacked, after someone by-passed her password after guessing the answer to the “secret question”.

She was obviously targeted because of her status, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen to you. With the average internet user having around 25 online profiles, a secure password is vital to ensure your safety online. The majority people are lazy though. They spend so much time on the net that it’s easier for people to use a simple password that has relevance to them, and is generally short. Remarkably, even though reports of cyber-crime and identity theft are through the roof, people still use passwords like “god”, “abc123” or the classically bad, “password”. These people can be loosely defined as idiots.

A solid password doesn’t have to be difficult, but it should be at least eight characters long and ALWAYS contain a mix of letters and numbers, and if you want to be extra secure – symbols.

Here’s a good way of building a secure, and hopefully memorable password.

•    I’ll start with the word: technologynews (14 characters)
•    Right, now let’s substitute some of the letters for numbers: t3chn010gyn3ws
•    Already that’s pretty solid, but to make it extra tough you could capitalise some of the letters: T3cHn010gYn3wS

That leaves us with a pretty tough password that you need to memorise. It’s not too hard to memorise one password like this, but unless you have a photographic memory, then you’ll struggle to remember a further 24 passwords if you fall into the average net user category.

It’s fair to say that this password is no way the toughest in the world. You could go military style and uses something like 8Uji#ge3s9%=vw2L93VuX>hT:5tPg. When it comes to security, especially if it’s your business, then you should make it as tough as possible.

One way of remembering all your new passwords is to utilise a password manager. These are readily available either online or local and the majority offer ‘one-click-login’ so you don’t even have to remember your gobbledygook.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 11:57 am and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.