How Secure is Your Password? Create a Strong Password and Sleep Well

password-protection

Our on-line content, bank accounts, shopping accounts and social network accounts are as safe as our passwords are. Most people don’t  consider password security important and they ignore the fact that one day they may be victims of personal data theft, credit card theft or botnets. Do you want to be a botnet zombie? Maybe you want to be a botnet zombie because you don’t know yet about botnets, but what  if i tell you that there is a high chance to go in jail if you get infected with a botnet? Yes. Why? Because your computer is not yours anymore, it is still on your desk but it is controlled by another computer, the botnet master. When your computer gets infected with a botnet virus, it  becomes a robot. Botnet masters use bots to create a computer army and use this army to perform ‘illegal’ activities, like DDOS attacks, email Spam, advertising and so on.

These masters have real power and they can attack governments, organizations, on-line shops, innocent citizens and banks. They can control a country or the world from their laptop while drinking fruit juice in an exotic island. Cyber police thinks that you are the one which is performing illegal activities and they will knock on your door, not on the botnet master’s door. Uff, scary!

You will never think about personal security and work hard to create a strong password until your passwords get cracked and your private life becomes public property. If you want that, stop reading ! Let me give you a very good  ‘strong password scheme’. People don’t like to create strong passwords because they are very hard to remember, but a good thing has always a cost. This scheme will teach you how to create a strong password without the need of remembering anything.

Some rules to keep in mind when creating a password

1. Mix things like a barman

Try to have as many different characters as possible in your password. If you create a password  with only lowercase letters there is a high chance that this password will be cracked easily, because the attacker‘s program tries each possible combination of lowercase letters and see if it matches to your password. If you put uppercase letters and special characters, the number of combinations for creating a password  will increase and it will be time and energy consuming for the attacker. For example, ‘Password’ is harder to crack than ‘password’ and ‘Passw0rd’ is the hardest to crack of these three passwords

2. Try to speak leetspeak language

This is a language that is very useful and makes password stronger. It helps you to convert letters to numbers in a way that you can remember them. For example the A letter in English alphabet is a 4 in leetspeak, the o letter is equal to 0 etc. If your password is ‘ilovemyself’, you can use leetspeak to make it look like ‘1l0v3mys3lf’. Leetspeak makes it look like an alien language, but the more you practice, the more familiar it will look to you.

3. Password length is very important

Make sure your password is long. How long? Most authors say that a strong password should be at least 8 characters, but I suggest you make sure your password’s length is more than eight because the first thing an attacker will try is to create all the possible combinations with eight characters. 

How do I create my strong password?

It is time to show you how do you create a very strong password and how to remember it. Keep in mind that if a method for creating a password is very popular or it becomes popular it is not anymore the right method for creating passwords because attackers will create programs to use your method in order to find your passwords. I have passwords that protect my financial data and I always try to stay up to date with the popular methods and I try to create mine. If you want to make the strongest password for yourself you should think to create your own method for password creation. I want to sleep well, so I work hard! I do not want to wake up one morning with zero credit in my account. It is ‘blood money’, so I have to make sure my password is strong enough and attackers can not break it.

The strongest password is  the password that is created from a passphrase. A passphrase that is special to you and nobody knows about it, or maybe the wildest dream will fit perfect for a password. I bet that many people that are reading my post use the name of their spouses as passwords or their pet’s name. Go and change before someone else does it for you. I am good with words, I know it. How do I create my passwords? I go to www.youtube.com and I search for one of my favourite song for the moment. My friends think that I am a fan of Rick Ross (a famous rapper) because I listen a lot to his music, but they don‘t know that I do that just for trolling. Time to search on YouTube for a song from the rapper Rick Ross. I will pick “Rick Ross – Sixteen ft. Andre 3000”. To tell the truth I love this song. Its duration is seven minutes and fourty six seconds. Read carefully my words and try to remember the rules from the “Some rules to keep in mind when creating a strong password” paragraph. Every word will help you to create a very strong password. Now, what?

a) I  copy and paste the title of the song in my favourite text editor.

Rick Ross - Sixteen ft. Andre 3000

b) I  write the duration of the song

7:46

c) I write the website name where this password will be used, for example youtube.com. I do this so I can create a special password for another site from my main password. Never use the same password for every account. Some people use their Facebook password for their bank accounts. I don‘t want to be rude, but this is the most stupid thing I’ve ever seen in my all life.

www.youtube.com

Now, it is time to create my password. I never use space characters in my password, because I find hard to remember a password. I don‘t want to remember anything. In my opinion the strongest password is the password you create every time you log in to your account.

Rick Ross - Sixteen ft. Andre 3000 , 7:46, www.youtube.com

d) Now I try to connect them together.

RickRoss-Sixteenft.Andre30007:46www.youtube.com

I can use this password, but I love beautiful things, so i will try to make my password look cute. It is time to apply some rules. Always keep in mind three rules about password security, password length (long password), mix things (uppercase, lowercase, numbers, special characters) and leetspeak language (convert alphabet letters to numbers). Let me apply some rules to my long string.

R1ckR0$$-$1xt33nft4ndr330007:46www.y0tub3.c0m (leetspeak rule)

To make my password short, I take the first letters of every word that forms the URL of the website. For example, if I create a password for www.youtube.com, I take w,y and c and form wyc, a simple word that I add at the end of my main password. My main password is:

RR1ckR0$$-$1xt33nft4ndr330007:46

Now I add @wycand it is done.

R1ckR0$$-$1xt33nft4ndr330007:46@wyc

If the site does not allow me to create a password with this kind of length, I take the first letter for every word of my main password and add @wyc (@site) at the end. I hope you find useful my method and please, share it with your friends and your family.