So today is World Password Day! I know we all hate changing our passwords and we really hate when IT comes through and takes the sticky notes reminding us of what our passwords are–that used to be my job 🙂
The challenge is making a password that we can remember yet meets all of IT’s requirements, so lets look at a simple method.
Mnemonics, we learned these as kids things like: “Men Very Easily Make Jugs Serve Useful Needs Perhaps” Now that’s definitely long enough but fails a few security issues so let’s start with shortening it a bit; MVEMJSUNP (In case you haven’t worked it out those are the 8 planets and poor little Pluto). Now all CAPS won’t work so pick one that is not on either end to be a capitol letter the obvious first choice would be the letter C but we don’t have one so let’s use S since C mimics S frequently: mvemjSunp Now we need a special character and those very a bit system by system for now we will use the ampersand; mvemjSun&p Now a number; mv3mjSun&p That brings us to ten characters which suffices for most systems, it does not spell anything so makes it hard to crack, keeps numerals, special characters, and capitol letters out of first and last position. The real beauty here is you can do this with any mnemonic, song lyric, poem, special event dates–combine more than one as these are easily guessed, or even a quote, that you can easily remember.
Have fun with your passwords and they become much easier to deal with.
