Choosing an Effective Password

Think that the password for your computer system, e-mail, web site, web forum is secure? Well, you might be wrong.

There are many programs on the Internet that can allow someone to repeatedly enter words from the dictionary into your user name and password field to attempt to gain access. This type of attack is called a brute force hack. As many times your user name for certain things is your e-mail address or the word admin, all the malicious person has to do is figure out your log-in name and run this application for hours or even days to see if you have made your password a word contained in the dictionary file.

Common excuses I get from people I tell this to include: â€œBut it’s hard to remember a number or something that I don’t use on a day to day basis.”

While I can understand and relate to that, having a secure password can reduce the amount of problems, and security issues you have to worry about. Also, many times if you create a properly secure password, you can use that one password on almost any site, as it will work for sites that require you to come up with a reasonable length password containing certain items.

One way to make a secure password, but simple to remember is to use an everyday word, but by making letters of the word into numbers, it makes it harder for a malicious user to guess my password.

Something that looks like the letter, for example, you can make an “E” into a 3. The word “Example” thus turns into “3xample”.

Most applications and sites now tell you to make at least one letter of the word you have chosen to be your password capitalized. Since many sites have it set up that a lower case “n” is not the same as an uppercase “N”, this makes it harder to figure out which letters of the word you have chosen to capitalize. For example, “WaShINgtoN”.

If you really want a secure password you can mix this two concepts. Here is an example of how the combination might look. Example: “4lPhaB3t”, which would be “alphabet”. Notice how the 4 looks like a little like an “A”?

One last tip to creating an effective password is that the longer you make your password the harder it is going to be for someone to figure it out.

Remembering these simple rules will help keep your things private.