And Slaters Go Plop

Most of us know that a good password is one that is longer than eight characters and contains upper- and lower-case letters as well as numbers. We also know that we shouldn’t use the same password on too many different sites or applications. If you use the same password in Hotmail as well as your bank account it makes it a lot easier for someone who has hacked your Hotmail account to get into your bank.

The problem with this is that keeping track of lots of jumbly passwords is a nightmare. So we generally end up going for the easiest, but least secure, option.

Well, I’ve got a solution that I’ve been using for a few months now and, in the interests of better security, I’m going to share it with you:

• First, pick a couple of weird words that you’ll remember. For example SlatersPlop is nice and weird.
• Now turn a couple of letters into numbers: Slater5Pl0p.
• This is now a pretty strong password in its own right. It’s got numbers and upper- and lower-case letters and it’s eleven characters long.
• Now you need to make the password relate somehow to the site or application you are using. In this case if we were using the password to log in to Hotmail I’d put an “h” (for “hotmail”) into it somewhere: Slater5hPl0p. If I wanted to use it to log into Windows I might use Slater5wPl0p
• As long as you use a consistent location to insert your contextual letter it becomes a breeze to remember which password you used for which site.
• Now the only thing to do is to change it from time to time. I’ve decided to do it on a yearly basis which would probably horrify some security people.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 1:43 pm and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.