What is a good Password?

Put simply a good password for your computer is one that you can remember easily and that no one else knows, or can work out. So it needs to be both a secure password and memorable.

What do we need to do to ensure that we have a good password?

There are several rules that we can use to ensure that our passwords are not easily guessed, these include:-

• Don’t use names
• Don’t use days of the week or months
• You should include some non alphabetic characters in your password (numbers and or symbols)
• A password needs to have a minimum of 5 characters, preferably 8 or more, in order to make it more difficult to crack
• It shouldn’t be the same as other passwords that you use
• It shouldn’t be so complex that you have to write it down to make sure that you can remember it

So it can be easy to generate complex good passwords, to be honest that’s the easy part, almost anyone can create a complex password. The challenge is remembering the password.

Good Passwords and Social Engineering

Social engineering is a strange term but basically it refers to using what you know about people to work out what their passwords are. If you know that someone’s favourite football team is Liverpool then its amazing how simple it can be to guess their password, even bearing in mind our complexity guidelines above. So the obvious passwords are:-

• L1verp001 (L one verp zero zero one)
• Liverpool01 (Liverpool zero one)
• 1iverp001 (one iverp zero zero one)

This shows why you shouldn’t use real words as part of your password, if you do it will never be a good password, as it will be simple for the Social Engineer to crack.

Good Passwords and Shoulder Surfing

If you have a good password you still need to type it into your computer to access your on-line banking site or Facebook etc. Shoulder Surfing is the term for gently looking over someone’s shoulder as they type in their password, as you slowly cruise past them. If its a complex password you probably recite it to your self as you slowly type it in or read it off  from your list, hopefully not written under the keyboard of your computer.

I have a good password now what?

Now that we know that our password is good what should you do to make sure that our data stays secure?

The first thing is make sure that you don’t use the same password everywhere. Some information is more important than other information, so you wouldn’t want to use the same password for you on-line banking as you do for your Facebook or LinkedIn account.  That brings us to the next problem, if you have too many different passwords you can’t remember them all, so what do people do, that’s right they get written down somewhere.

Lots of people store passwords as ‘phone numbers’ against contacts in an address book. i.e. Barclaycard 0207-54663 where the phone number is the password they they use to access the Barclaycard website. The slightly more ‘High Tech’ equivalent is to store them as a contact in your mobile phone, but its still just as obvious.

Keep that good password safe

You complex good password needs to be kept safe and secure. That means that you shouldn’t write it down, I don’t know about you but my memory just isn’t that good. I need to keep a copy of the passwords that I use stored somewhere. I use RoboForm a secure password application, to hold all of my good passwords, that way if I can’t remember a specific good password then I only need to remember one, very, complex password in order to get to my password store.

Take a look at RoboForm and you never need remember another password again. There are even versions of RoboForm for your mobile phone (iPhone, Android, etc), so you can keep  your passwords secure on the one device everyone always has with them.

You can use the FREE version of RoboForm forever completely free of charge. You can go to the RoboForm website at www.roboform.com or download it direct from ComputerSpot. Using an application allows you to keep all of your passwords in one place, keep them secure and it allows you to use complex passwords without the headache  of having to remember them all. One of the joys of Secure Password Stores is not having to remember passwords when you visit websites, a prompt will pop up asking if you want to use the stored password.

There are lots of Secure Password Store applications if you don’t like RoboForm, just search with Google and choose your own favourite application to store your good password.

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