Neutron2K's Computing Tutorials

Making Good, Strong Passwords

Passwords are a very important thing when it comes to computers, and even more so when you get involved with the Internet. Passwords are usually the sole defence for your personal data, and the only thing that is really keeping people away from it. If your password is weak or easily guessable, you could be in trouble.

What Makes a Weak Password?

A Weak password is very easy to come up with. Everyday words and names of objects, items and places are common examples of weak passwords. You would be surprised at how many users in the world use ‘pencil’ as their password.

Another example of a weak password is when you use a piece of easily obtainable information about yourself that someone could guess – such as the name of your main pastime, or your date of birth etc.

Case sensitivity almost always plays a part in passwords these days to. If you type your password all in lower case, it makes it easier to guess because uppercase and lowercase characters all have a different ASCII code to represent them. This basically means for example that to a computer, the letter ‘s’ is not the same as the letter ‘S’.

The length of your password is also a crucial point in determining whether a password is weak. The shorter the password, the easier it is to guess or crack.

What Makes a Strong Password?

The strongest possible password anyone could ever make would be to randomly hit keys and numbers in different cases and make it as long as possible. However this really isn’t an option because memorizing it you would be a problem.

To make a strong password you should use a number of random characters in varying cases, and also randomly insert numbers into the mix. Try to avoid using any easily obtainable information or anything that someone could guess. If you really need a password you can remember easily, then you could take a word and mix some numbers in randomly and change the case of various letters to make it harder to crack.

As mentioned above, the longer the password, the harder it is to crack.

Another key point to strong passwords is making sure that you do not use the same password for everything. You should ideally have a different password for every account you have, be they email, forums passwords or ftp passwords etc. Its ok to use the same password for one or two different things, but using the same for everything is totally out of the question. If someone were to crack your password – they have instant access to everything.

Other Password Tips

Never write your password down and leave it in an easily accessible or obvious place.
Always use a mixture of letters, numbers and mixed case in your password.
DO NOT use easily obtainable personal information
Never tell anyone your password.
Never store your passwords on your computer in an un protected document.