Ok, so we’ve all heard that we should use strong passwords for our online accounts lest someone break into it after a few guesses. You also don’t want to associate it with yourself (dog’s name, birthday, etc.) for the same reason, and you want to use a combination of lowercase and capital letters, numbers and maybe even non-alphanumeric characters such as #, % or $. Alright, now show of hands of how many of you do that? Alright, so there’s more raised hands than a few years ago. Good job! But not so fast …
You might’ve also heard that while having a strong password is good, if you use the same one for all (or almost all) sites that you use, then there goes a lot of the strength of the strong password. The importance of this was demonstrated in December when passwords were hacked from the blog Gawker and posted online for the world to access. In and of itself, this might not have been so damaging except that many users used the same password on other more interesting sites such as Gmail or Facebook. Ok, so now, a show of hands of how many of you have a strong password that’s unique for every site? That’s what I thought. Not so many of you. It’s not surprising, actually. Studies have shown that about 3 out of 4 people use the same password across most of the sites that they use! And most of the others probably have a handful of passwords that they rotate through.
I know what you’re thinking, “I’m supposed to create a password that looks like there was a spider on my keyboard that I was trying to smash AND have a different one for every site … and I’m supposed to remember those?!” Yes, I know. Life is rough. But with my easy-to-follow instructional DVD for only $19.95, I can show you how! (or just read on for free …) It doesn’t need to be so bad. You just need to devise your own system for creating passwords. And it’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it! I’ll show an example similar to what I do (with a few alternate variations along the way):
- Think of a number (let’s say 4-6 digits). This will be used in all of your passwords, so make it good. Don’t use your birthday or your child’s birthday, if you can. And don’t do repeating numbers or sequential numbers (3333 or 12345). You know the rules if you’re here. How about the street number that you grew up on? Or the first 2 and last 2 digits of your cell phone number? I’ll choose: 5629.
- Now, let’s say we’re creating a password for Thiseye.com. Choose two letters that are representative of the site. You could choose “T” and “E” because they are the first and last letters in “Thiseye”, or you could choose the first two letters of the domain name (“T” and “H”), or the last two letters (“Y” and “E”). For this example, I’ll use the first and last letter of the domain (“T” and “E”).
- The final thing we need is a way to take our two letters from the previous step and make it even stronger! So I’m going to describe one technique and then propose a few others. My two letters were “T” and “E”. So I’m going to generate a string of characters starting with a “T” and hitting whatever key is to the right of it on the keyboard* (“Y”), then do the same for my second letter. Hit “E” and hit whatever key is to the right of it (“R”). This results in “tyer”. But I’m also going to hold SHIFT for the first two characters, so I actually produce: “TYer“. Note that you don’t need to remember the “y” and the “r” part of this password. All you need to remember is that your 2-letter combination is “TE” and that you chose to go with the key to the right of each while holding SHIFT for the first two letters. And maybe add a rule so that if your letter is already on the right-most part of the keyboard, you just repeat the letter. So “RP” generates “RTpp” because there is no letter to the right of the “P”. Make sense?
Alternatively, you could choose to hold the SHIFT key for the first and third letters or various combinations thereof. Or start with the key to the left of “T”, then “T”, then repeat to get “RtWe”. Ideally, you want to choose a system that will consistently give you capital and lowercase letters for this part.
- Ok, now let’s put it all together. I’m going to add the number I chose from step 1 to the end of the result from step 3 (but you could do it the other way). So I get: “TYer5629″ as my password. BUT, I’m going to hold SHIFT down during the first half of the number sequence (just like we did in step 3) if the site allows special characters (unfortunately many sites don’t … especially banking sites for some reason) resulting in: “TYer%^29″
Finally, let’s recap: we have a system that will generate a unique password per site, that doesn’t contain any dictionary words, that is a mixture of lowercase and capital letters, numbers, and special characters. And all I have to remember is: “5629, first and last characters of domain name, and two with SHIFT, two without with the key to the right after each letter”! Sounds like a lot, but once you do it a few times, it gets very simple to do … and it just gets in your fingers. And the interesting thing is, even YOU don’t really know the password; you simply know how to build it!
So I come to a new site that I want to register on: espn.com… what’s my password? Easy: ERpp%^29
If all this is just a bit too much, just use Lastpass.com. It’s a great tool to help you generate and store strong passwords securely across multiple computers. Or you can even use it with the system that I’ve outlined to create your own passwords, but just LastPass to manage them (which is what I do).
Post a comment below to let me know what you think!
* Standard English QWERTY keyboard. This example might be problematic if you travel overseas a lot and use foreign keyboards.
