A friend of mine recently fell victim to the Facebook 419 scam (basically someone logs into your Facebook account and asks your friends for money).
There are lots of ways bad things can happen to your computer and your online accounts, but if you use weak passwords, you’re increasing the risk that something bad will eventually happen to you. There are lots of articles about what makes a strong password, but I want to tell you how to create a strong password that’s easy for you to remember. If you have to write down your strong passwords, then you probably haven’t accomplished much.
If you read the Wikipedia article above, you’ll see that one recommendation is that passwords should be 12-14 characters long. If you’re like most of us, creating a password of that length that includes numbers, letters and special characters can seem daunting. Let me share some tricks I’ve learned in the past decade or so that I’ve been working online.
First of all, passwords containing any part of your birthday or anniversary are usually a bad idea. Especially if that information is displayed in your account online (Facebook). Also passwords that contain your spouse’s name, your kids names, etc. aren’t going to be too tricky in this world of social networking.
So, what do you choose? My favorite method right now is using songs, poems or other text you have memorized in the course of your lifetime to create a long, but easy-to-remember password.
Here’s how it works.
- Choose your text. For the example, I’m going to use the first line of the Gettysburg address, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
- Now reduce this to just the first 14 words as such: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent”
- Now just use the first letter of each word with proper capitalization and punctuation and you suddenly have a very good password: ‘Fsasyaofbf,utc’.
Notice that the password contains uppercase and lowercase letters and one special character, a comma. Yes, keep the comma in the password. You could also substitute the actual numbers into the text as such: ‘4sa7yaofbf,utc’. Now the password contains numbers, letters and special characters. If you just look at the password it appears completely random, but it’s so easy to remember.
The same thing applies to songs. Perhaps you’re a fan of Sean Kingston, so you choose the chorus of “Fire Burning” which is “Somebody call 911 Shawty fire burning on the dance floor…” Your new password is ‘Sc911Sfbotdf’.
If you’re a Bible reader, you have many, many ways to create complex passwords. For example you may include the scriptural reference in addition to a portion of the referenced passage. You might choose John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son…” to create the password, ‘J3:16FGsltw,thghobS’. That one is 19 characters long, contains uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and two special characters, but it’s amazingly simple to remember.
Using this technique, you can also create a set of strong passwords that you can use on different sites. Perhaps you associate the first letter of the site name with an author, scripture or recording artist/song. Twitter then becomes related to Thoreau or Thessalonians or Til Tuesday, while Facebook is related to Faulkner or First Timothy or Fatboy Slim.
My best recommendation is to start right away with at least one strong password. Get rid of your 4-6 character passwords. Get rid of your birthday or name-based passwords. Pick something that you’ve already memorized and make a password that really works.
Last note: Unfortunately not all web sites allow you to be completely creative with your passwords. Some sites don’t allow special characters. Other’s set limits on the length of a password. Hopefully that will change soon, but until then, you might have to tweak some of your choice to fit some of the sites you use. Don’t let that discourage you from using better passwords on the sites that allow it.
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