Potty time: safe and secure passwords

While most people will create passwords that are easy to recall, having a safe and secure password requires a lot from a person.

Character wise
A safe and secure password must use letters (a-z) in both cases (a-z and A-Z) alternately, numbers (0-9) and characters (@,$,%,&, etc) in one password alone. An example is abc@123. This is a 7 character password using alphanumeric (letters and numbers) characters and a special character.

Some may write their passwords as aBc@12E. In this example, a certain letter is capitalized to break the sequential pattern (i.e. a-b-c) and a number (3) is substituted for its alphabetical equivalent (3 = e).

Numbers and letters can be substituted for each other. Here is what I have so far: 1 = i, 3 = e, 4 = h, 0 = o.

Length wise
Long passwords are hard to crack. The longer the harder. I have seen people typing in about 12 characters using the QWERTY side of the keyboard along with the number row on top (with shift pressed) and the number pad at the right side. The password must look something like this "sg85@sgh89t8"

One can memorize all the characters. But at this time, we all have more than one account that requires a password. You have your email account (personal, office, business, and monkey-business), your blog account, your photo archive account (photobucket, flicker), internet bank account, and your online community account (friendster, facebook, yahoo! 360).

Well, you can use the same password in all your accounts. The only problem is if your password in one account is discovered all your other accounts are in danger.

Variety
You can vary you password pattern in different accounts. For accounts that you think may not be that important or that you can rebuild after it is ruined, just have a simple password that you can remember and someone else can guess.

For accounts that record you personal and financial assets, transactions, and communications, have a more complicated password for them.

If your account requires you to change the password regularly, try to come up with 3 different passwords that you can easily remember. You may write it down and keep it locked away. But committing it to memory is the safest way.

Connections
Most hackers or those who are plain troublemakers will want to find a connection between you and the password. If you deeply adore your a person or even just your cat, the hacker will just try using the cat's or person's name or nickname in different variations (alpahnumeric and special character combinations, forward, backwards, reversed segments) to access you account.

One way to avoid this problem but still retain a good chance of remembering the password is by connecting the password with someone or something that you used to know or have but is not in any way connected with you anymore.

An example will be a nickname you gave your toy when you were a child that nobody else outside your family knows about. Or the name or nickname of the person you used to plan in having a relationship then but did not bloom. Or the birthday of a person you have a crush with 10 years ago.

I hope this will help you make your accounts more secure. Happy computing!