Quick tips to secure passwords

December 01, 2013

One of the more frustrating exercises in using anything online is keeping your passwords safe. They have to be easy to remember and hard to guess. Here is a trick I've used for years that seems to work for passwords, Social Security numbers, telephone numbers, birthdates and anything that needs to be safe. Develop a solid base password This should be a 79-character base that has a combination of upper/lower case letters, numbers, and one or two special characters. For example, the airport code for Phoenix, AZ is PHX' and a date I easily remember is the day JFK was assassinated, 11-22-1963. So using that as a starting point, I can morph it a little to increase the complexity: PHX becomes PhX, and with 11-22-1963 I can substitute ! for the 1s and the # (shift 3) for the number 3. That results in a base password of PhX!!22!96#Now that you have the base password, develop a schema for any password site name. For exampleGoogle Gmail could become gml or gglgml, making my password for Google Gmail PhX!!2!!96#gml or PhX!!2!!96#gglgml. Easy to remember and difficult to crack. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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