Sometimes, you just can't win on a password

After everything we looked at in the previous blog entry, there is then this alternate approach to passwords.

Frustrating, perhaps, that passwords can be this difficulty. But there is the big takeaway...don't make yourself an easy password target. With a fairly small amount of effort, you can fortify your passwords pretty easily.

More on Pa$$w0rd$...

OK....you get it.


You need some secure passwords.


You need something hard to guess, but easy to remember. (That's an oxymoron right there.)


You need to protect your accounts.


But how to do that easily?


Here are some tricks and ideas to use to generate passwords that get really strong really fast. Think of this as taking your passwords to the gym to bulk them up....minus the smelly towels.

• Take an ordinary word, but start replacing letters with symbols. This trick involves makes you password tremendously more complex to crack, but just nominally harder to remember.

If your password is the word strength , you can toughen up that password by replacing letters with similar looking symbols.

1. Change the s to a $
2. Change the e to a 3 (because a capital E looks like a 3 in the mirror....also a reminder of the gym).
3. And for emphasis on all your heavy lifting, drop an explanation point at the end !

Your really simple-to-crack password of 

strength (crackable in about 3.5 minutes)

just became the exponentially more difficult

$tr3ngth! (crackable in about 35 days...way more buff, right?)

Password cracking programs know these same tricks and will try commonly substituted characters. But even so, this simple change makes you a much less desirable target.

• Use something easy for you to remember, but completely obscure to anyone else.

This trick is a sweet one, because you can "nerd out" on something you love, and justify it. Let's say you follow baseball. On the day you select a password, pick the batting average leader and make it into a password.

Here is the leader board for the day I wrote this blog entry. You might use a first initial, last name and batting average.

Your password is CRuiz.362 Finally, that statistic you store in your brain has a justifiable purpose. And when the time comes to change your password, just look up the new batting champ, and you likely will have a new name and number at your fingertips.

Or you select the division leader, and how many games back the last place team currently stands. Or use the name of the last major movie you saw, with the actors name, and the number of stars you would have given it. You get the idea. Just find something that sticks for you.

I use this one myself...not so much the batting or movie part, but I have a methodology of picking passwords that guarantees something unique on any given day based on my life events, and is still meaningful and easy to remember for me.

• Treat passwords like your underwear: Change 'em often.

Enough said, right?

The trick to strong passwords is this: No password is infinitely secure. You will always be breakable, just like someone can always break into your house. No matter how strong your security system, someone who wants in will find a way in.

The goal here is to make yourself a harder target. Just like a pick-pocket will target the guy flashing his wallet and money around and skip over those harder to get, you can do something similar with a smartly-chosen password.

Now then....don't you feel stronger? And you haven't even touched a dumbbell...

Passwords are NOT Secret Words

Thinking on passwords....make sure you don't give away your password quite like this...

...and click on the image if you need to indulge.

Your Password shouldn't be password

How important is your password?

In the wake of what happened a little while back at LinkedIn, pretty important. In case you missed it, about 6.5 million passwords were hacked and released on-line about 10 days ago.

The problem is not so much that someone can access your LinkedIn account. Yes, I suppose they could do dastardly things like change your work experience or write a funny recommendation for someone else. But truth is, LinkedIn passwords themselves are not that valuable.

And now there is a value attributed to those stolen LinkedIn passwords: $1. With $1, a criminal can grab a large Diet Coke from McDonalds or your LinkedIn password.

If someone has your LinkedIn password, it is quite likely they have much more. The trick is that you probably use your password over and over and over again...

...for LinkedIn.

...for Facebook.

...for your on-line banking.

...for your company e-mail.

Getting nervous yet?

A few ideas for making your passwords more secure:

• Keeping your passwords varied, and not re-using them for at least one year.
• Avoid Querty-based patterns (for example, 12345 or asdfghjkl).
• Mix capital and lower-case letter formats.
• Substitute letters and mix in numbers whenever possible.
• Switch word orders.
• and PLEASE don't use the word password

There was a time when I could very often guess passwords. There were three tricks:

1. Use the word password 
2. Use the name of a child or pet
3. Flip over the mousepad.

Using just those techniques, I could break in about half the time. Seriously. Don't be that easy.

Secure those passwords, mix them up, and PLEASE CHANGE THEM every so often. I realize password changes are a pain.  But then so is fighting fraud and explaining that nasty-gram from your e-mail account didn't really come from you.