How Strong Are Your Passwords?
I run 2 websites; my personal site and a BBS for my family to use for family matters. I also do a lot of things on-line, and it seems that every site I access needs a password. I would guess that I have perhaps over a hundred sites that use passwords. Password security is a very important thing for me.
There are different kinds of passwords: weak, medium, and strong. Weak passwords are simple short, and easy to figure out: cat, dog, mommy, sister, or family. Medium passwords are a little better; they will often combine letters and numbers, are longer, and are a little more difficult to figure out: way2goman, number1guy, 1of9boys, high54you. Strong passwords have a few more requirements:
- they should be over eight characters long,
- combine letters, numbers and symbols that are not sequential,
- not common words with letters replaced by numbers and symbols,
- not a login name, words from a dictionary forward or backward,
- and are easy to remember, where they can be typed without looking at the keyboard
The ISP I use just added a new feature: when changing a password, it tells you the relative strength of a password, that’s what got me going on this train of thought. I looked around, and found a password generator and a password strength meter. These are two really useful tools that can make security really easy, and I intend to use them early and often.
