28 Sep Making the Perfect Password
Making a new password can be one of the most frustrating things you can do online—every website has different rules about length and complexity, and you have to add your password to an ever-growing list in your memory. However, knowing the details of what goes into a password can give you the insight you need to make a password that’s both secure and easy to remember.
What Happens When You Make a Password?
When you make a password, the service or website that you’re signing up for usually encrypts the password before storing it on its servers. That way, even if a hacker were to gain access to your password through a cyber attack, he or she still won’t have access to the text that makes up your password.
Hackers can use sophisticated programs to decrypt passwords, either by trying variations of common passwords or by “brute forcing,” where a program will try every possible combination of letters, numbers and symbols in an effort to crack your password. That’s why website often require passwords to include uppercase letters, numbers and symbols—these special characters exponentially increase the number of possibilities that hackers will have to brute force in order to get access to your real password.
Making Your Password
However, just because passwords should be long doesn’t mean that they have to be overly complex—as long as a password is long enough and includes a special character or two, it can thwart almost any attempt to crack it.
The next time you have to make a password, try typing in a favorite quote from a book, or a saying that’s familiar to you. Turning a saying like “your guess is as good as mine” into “yourguessisasgoodasmine” actually makes for a strong, and in this case ironic, password! And, if you add a capital letter or special character somewhere too, the password will only be that much stronger.
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