Make your Passwords Easy to Remember and Hard to Forget

Are your passwords on this list?  If so you will probably want to change them....

The frightening thing about this list is that there are at least a third of them I remember preaching against their use in the mid 90s when I was schleppin' a bag around the country trying to raise awareness for sloppy InfoSec practices.  Really??  After all this time people are still using the same ones???

You may think you have nothing valuable to protect with that password...that may be true, but I find it unlikely.  At a significantly increasing rate, our lives are intertwined with our inbox (check out this post to learn more out our email usage in general)

Here are some things to think about with regard to your email and why it is important to keep this data secure.  Does your email contain any of the following... 

• Financial statements
• Medial information
• Sensitive information about a loved one
• Emails from that special person in our life

So you may think that having the same password across multiple sites may make things easier - it does. However it also makes it easier for a hacker to get into your email account if (when?) your online game site is hacked if your username and password for your email is the same.  What about using the same username and/or password for Facebook and your online banking?

This link has a bunch of suggestions for creating hard to guess, but easy to remember passwords. For instance, I prefer passwords that are phrases of sorts. The challenge with passwords is that they can become hard to remember when you have too many of them. There are a lot of cross-platform password managers out there to help you remember your passwords and keep them safe. For example - Keepass, RoboForm and Lastpass.

You may want to change your password - and for the record, "letmein" and "l3tm31n" are just as easy for the computer to guess...

-TheJunkie

Check out XKCD for some password fun!

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