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How to Create a Hard-to-Crack Password

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Create a Hard-to-Crack Password

Simple passwords put your online security--and all your information--at risk, but you may be surprised by how many people have easy-to-crack passwords.

A recent study of 10,000 Hotmail, MSN and Live.com passwords that were exposed online found that "123456" was the most commonly used password. That no-brainer appeared 64 times.

Forty-two percent of the passwords used lowercase letters from a to z; only 6 percent mixed alpha-numeric and other characters, according to the analysis published in "Wired" Magazine.

Luckily, there are a few simple rules you can follow to create smart passwords that are hard to crack to protect yourself on the World Wide Web.

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    Difficulty:
    Easy

    Instructions

    Things You'll Need

    • A little imagination
      • 1

        Know what not to do. The easiest-to-crack passwords are too few digits, all lowercase letters, all numbers in an easy-to-guess pattern, or a name, according to "Wired."

      • 2

        Choose a password with at least eight characters to be secure. The characters should be a mix of numbers and lowercase and uppercase letters.

      • 3

        Don't use names or numbers that are easily identified with you. No names of your children, dog, street address, phone number, birthdate or other personally connected words.

      • 4

        Use techniques that create passwords which appear to be nonsense. Take a sentence that you can remember. It should contain some numbers. Some of the words in the sentence should be capitalized. Here's an example sentence: By age 5 Megan could type 48 words per minute. As a password, that sentence would be: Ba5Mct48wpm.

        An example from Microsoft offered the sentence "My son Aiden is three years old." As a password that could read "MsAi3yo". Or, for even more complexity, use symbols to replace letters. With symbols substituted for some of the letters, you might end up with "M$8ni3y0."

      • 5

        Choose a phrase for an effective password. For example: prairie dogs. If some of the letters in the phrase were capitalized, it would be even better. For example: praiRie doGs. If numbers were used to replace some of the letters in the phrase it would be better yet. If a=4 and o=0, then the password would be: pr4iRie d0Gs.

    Tips & Warnings

    • If you've been using easy-to-crack passwords, take the time to go to your online accounts and change your passwords to more secure ones.

    • Take advantage of Microsoft password checker to test your new passwords to make sure they will be hard to crack.

    • Keep your passwords secret.

    • Do not give a password that will be hard to remember.

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    Comments

    • lilmisstrouble Nov 28, 2010
      This is very important info for everybody. I don't think they realize how easy it is for them to get hacked. Good article!
    • peter432 Apr 09, 2010
      ww excellent tips on creating the secure password, some examples are just amazing.
    • larrybest Apr 07, 2010
      JKhamlin - Well put! I see this in the office all the time. Ppl are writing down passwords. I use similar method as westfalr. I=1 Z=2 E=3 A=4 S=5 G=6 L=7 B=8 9=P O=0. Then for ease to remember, I write down something familiar in my life at the present.. for example on a postit I write the word to associate with the password. Jaden Lee which means my password is "J4d3n733" or Van Halen = "V4nH473n" (no spaces). Train your brain to look at the numbers first as letters. H0p3 th15 h3795!
    • lynsuz12 Apr 07, 2010
      Great tips, I have a very hard to come up with passwords.
    • Virginia DeBolt Apr 07, 2010
      As bkaye said, storing passwords in a password protected file (the file should also be encrypted) when you have multiple passwords to remember is helpful. And we all have multiple passwords to remember, don't we.

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