While important, passwords needs not be painful
Internet services like Gmail, Facebook or web banking, passwords are now part of everyday life. What's important to appreciate however is that for many of these services the only thing protecting your account is your password. For that reason it's worthwhile to take the time to select a good one.
Choosing your password
The best way to choose a password is to base it on something you're already well familiar with, and to use a phrase rather than a single word. Examples of something easy to remember are a favourite song, or poem or maybe a phrase from a book.
People have a special song that they and their partner share, or a favourite book or a poem that has stayed with them. Whether it's a contemporary song or book, be sure to select a something that is easy to remember and that you know the words of.
For example using the first two lines from the Prospectus by William Wordsworth
My voice proclaims
How exquisitely the individual Mind
Using these 2 lines above, taking the first letter of each word would give the following:
mvphetim
A good password but this can be strength further by making the M for my a capital letter and doing the same for the words Proclaims and Individual. Now our password would look like:
MvPhwtIm
We have a strong password, but a number of password systems also require the use of special characters and numbers. By adding a comma and ampersand '&' plus a number our password now becomes:
Mv,PhwtIm&5
Please don't use these examples as your actual password.
Whether you use a song, poem or phrase from a book for your password it should be something private to you and it's easy to remember.
Passwords to avoid
There are bad passwords, they are bad or weak passwords because they are easy to guess or crack, allowing criminals easy access to your online accounts. Types of passwords you should not use are those that are a person's name, a place name, a dictionary word, or are the same as the account name. Some examples of passwords that should never be used are:
123456 password michael iloveyou
canada monkey letmein qwerty
For each purpose, a password
It is common now days to have more than one online account, firstly there is the bank, then your email account and the list goes on. You should never use the same password for all of your accounts, doing so risks all of your online accounts being stolen. Instead using the idea above from creating strong passwords you can create different passwords for each account.
Another point to keep in mind is never use your passwords from work for your personal online accounts and vice versa of course.
With your personal online accounts, rate them by value, keeping accounts that manage money or valuable personal details with different passwords from those accounts that don't.
Refreshing your password
Passwords should be changed at regular intervals, but what interval? A good rule of thumb could be when your toothbrush needs to be changed, or the start of a new month, them update your passwords. The new password can be based on the next verse of the song, or chapter of the book or verse of the poem.
If you've been using or use an computer at an Internet cafe, you should take the precaution to change your password. If you have a smart phone that you use to receive services like email, Facebook or Internet chat on, and it's stolen, then you must change the passwords of the affected services.
Helpful tips and tools
Maintaining a number of passwords can be difficult, therefore recording your passwords is a good idea. Don't record your passwords in a document, spreadsheet, or a plain text file on your computer, as they will be available to anyone who can access your computer.
A password manager allows you to edit, read, delete your passwords; the links below are to some of the password managers available.
Password Safe for Windows http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/
KeePass Password Safe for Windows, OS X or Linux http://keepass.info/
A quick search with your favourite search engine will find other password managers.
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