strong password

When people create passwords, they often defeat the purpose by choosing parts of their names, the names of their pets, or even the word "password," itself, which was the most commonly used password for many years. Now that many password policies require the inclusion of a numeral, the most common password is "password1."

You can make your password much harder to break by using more characters, mixing upper and lower case letters, and including numbers and special characters. According to a security guide from Texas A&M University's Research Foundation, a six-character, single-case password has 308 million possible combinations, all of which a password cracker can go through in just a few minutes. Combining upper and lower case letters and using eight characters instead of six increases the possible combinations to 53 trillion; substituting a number for one of the letters yields 218 trillion possibilites; and substituting a special character or punctuation for another yields 6,095 trillion possible combinations. Although a password cracker can eventually go through that many combinations, it requires much more time and computing power.

People like to use passwords that will be easy for them to remember. A Microsoft article about security suggests that you use a memorable phrase instead of a word, and convert that phrase to a password. For example, the phrase, "I have 2 Labrador retrievers! Fido and Spot." could be expressed as Ih2Lr!F+S.

Read more about strong password: - SearchNetworking features an article called "Business security begins with a strong password policy." - Microsoft provides a security checklist: Creating Stronger Passwords. - Texas A&M University Research Foundation's security guide provides a tutorial on Weak Passwords.

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