I visited a friend recently who was lamenting how big a deal passwords have become in his life.
I certainly know his pain. Heck, we all do.
I’ve mentioned passwords here before, but it’s been a while, and we could all use a refresher.
I have to enter passwords into various systems, websites and apps dozens of times per day. Keeping them all straight should be easier, but if there’s a perfect system, I’m still looking for it.
I use a combination of trying my best to remember some passwords, while I employ a password manager called 1Password to help me remember the majority of them.
This week we will focus on how to create strong passwords, and next week I’ll go over password managers and how they work.
The bottom line for passwords is that you have to be able to remember them and they need to be long and complex enough to be safe.
I’ve taken to making my passwords a short phrase so they are easier for me to remember. I’m going to give several examples here, but, obviously, none of them are even close to what I use for a password.
If I have to create a password for a site, I’ll think up a short phrase like “ribs are for lunch.”
If you know anything about me, you’ll know I love barbecue and eat it most days for lunch.
So I might start with ribsareforlunch, but since most websites want letters and numbers and perhaps a capital letter and even a symbol, I might alter it to be ribsR4lunch or ribsR4lunch! or ribsR4lunch2017!
At work we have to change our network passwords every 90 days, and we can’t use the same password twice.
So to make it unique, yet still easy to remember, if I have to change it in April, I might use ribsR4lunch417!, changing the last three numbers to correspond with the month and year that the change occurred.
This is great for one website, but you shouldn’t use the same password across multiple sites for security reasons.
You can add the name of the website to the strong pass phrase to make it unique.
If you’re setting your Netflix password, you might make it ntflx-ribsR4lunch!
Use an abbreviation for the site, followed by the secure phrase.
There’s a web page to test the strength of passwords at howsecureismypassword.net. The page is sponsored by the popular password manager Dashlane.
You can try various passwords there to see how long it would take a computer to crack them. Don’t enter your actual password there, but try one that’s similar in complexity.
According to the site, it would take a computer 1 trillion years to crack ribsR4lunch2017!.
Next week we’ll talk about keeping track of your passwords.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Jim Rossman writes for The Dallas Morning News. He may be reached at jrossman@dallasnews.com.
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