Choosing a strong password and why is it important

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Hi Guys,

With many well known sites attacked by Hacker groups, its becoming relatively important to choose a password that is hard to crack in hashed form.

First thing is that companies who store password in plain text, you can’t do much there if your password is stolen, and companies who salt their user password make sure that the weaker password becomes a little bit harder to crack. Read more about salting here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_(cryptography)

Now when I choose a password for myself I follow the rules below

1. I use a combination of alphabets characters and symbols that does not depend on actual words.
2. I mix numbers in my password
3. So that I can remember my password I use phrases such as “My first car colour was black and I bought it in 2000″. So the password becomes MfccwbaIbii2006 Now add an exclamation symbol and your password becomes MfccwbaIbii2006!. This is a good password in my eyes
4. Use upper case and lower case characters in your password as you can see above what I have done.
5. Never use you name in your password
6. Never make password same as your login ID
7. Never ever use date of birth as you password.
8. Never use Dictionary words as your password.
9. Never use any important dates such as your anniversary and your child’s date of birth as your password.
10. Make sure that each login (different websites) have different passwords.
11. Most important is that make sure that you password length is atleast 15 characters long.

Now there are heaps of websites that will help you create a good password and all of them does a really wonderful job.

You have to remember that once your online Identity is stolen you identity can be used to launch many frauds.

With your stolen Identity which may include

1. name
2. Email
3. home address
4. social security number
5. credit card number
6.  Bank accounts etc

Your identity can thus be used to

1. Make new new credit card applications under your name
2. opening new bank account under your name
3. and do all sort of other not so good stuff.

We all noticed what happened with LinkedIn. I strongly suggested that If you haven’t already change your password to something secure.

More and more websites are getting attacked everyday so it is important to have a strong password so that you can limit the damage.

Just to add to this post I give you an example of one of my friend. Our conversation goes like this

Me: “Hey Mate! wassup?”

My Friend: “Dipressed!!”

Me: “Why what happened?”

My Friend: “Man! my Father got hold of my Facebook password and saw what he should not have got access to!!”

Me: “Why? how? What was you password?”

My Friend: “It was my Girl friends name, man! I set that up just to please her !!”

Me: “Man don;t feel that way, You should be pleased that at least Hackers did not knew your girl friends name? I smiled ”

My Friend: “Smiled!!”

Chat went on and on and I was able to explain it to him the importance of strong password and he agreed. He came back to me to get his password strength checked but I refused. Because even though I am his friend does not mean that I have to know his password.

This raised another important point that never ever give you password to anyone, noone

I will be launching a website to help people create a strong password very soon so stay tuned.

I hope that my insight on having a strong password should be agreed with.

Cheers

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