Choosing Your Password – 2
Since I wrote about choosing a password, there have been tons of blogs, articles and comments on the recent hacking of Twitter accounts. Among other things, security experts are talking about how to choose a good password. Following are some tips that I would like to add to my previous blog:
1. Single Dictionary words make a very weak password. Choose at least three word phrase.
2. Changing the letter case of just first or last letter is not good enough. Change the letter case of letters other than first or last letter.
3. Adding a number just to the beginning or end of the password to make it alphanumeric is also not good enough.
There is no perfect way to choose a good password. If you can create a unique account for each of your accounts and remember the login information, do so. For most people, creating a unique login account everytime is impractical. You just cant remember that many passwords. Is writing down passwords a good idea? It depends. How secure is the place you are storing your password in? One solution is to categorize
accounts and use same password for different categories such as work-important, work, home-important and home. The problem is that if one of your passwords is compromised, your other passwords in that category are also compromised. This maybe an acceptable risk.
As I said earlier, there is not perfect solution. What you can do is take all factors into account and create your own strategy.