Info Zone

Most often, I do get the chance to get access to people’s passwords, especially to their email accounts and I have noticed, most of them use personal information for their passwords, Yes we all know its hard to be memorizing passwords but using such means to generate passwords with the intension of easy memorization and remembrance is a compromise to security. Some use lose personal information such as their last names, mum’s name, lovers name, sister’s name , birthday, etc just any easy to remember personal information but they do forget these are things which can be easily guessed by close relations or friends. In effect such way of generating passwords is insecure.

Now that you know how insecure you’re password is, I’m going to show you how to generate secure and easy to remember passwords. Lets go through the don’ts when it comes to generating passwords.

1. Avoid Personal Information: As much as you can, avoid the use of personal information for passwords, these are easily guessed by anyone close to you.
2. Don’t Use Short Characters: Short characters for passwords are easily cracked with password cracking tools.
3. Avoid The Use Of Real Words: Real words  such as helpme,gaming,hey,you, etc are easily cracked. A little password cracking tool will get them to have your password.
4. Avoid One Password For All Accounts: Because you can’t memorize all those gazillions of passwards, you choose to use one password for all accounts, that is really a bad practise, when someone get hold of that password, it means, that person has access to all your accounts.

To the dos

1. Keep Characters Long: Always keep your password characters very long. At least 8 characters should be okay even though most web applications requires at least 6 characters long but that is not enough, it doesn’t pay a penny to add two characters to those normal six characters.
2. Mix With Other Character type: As a healthier and secure practise, always mix your passwords with other character types.Eg !,#,@,%,^,&,*,(,etc
3. Cultivate The Habit Of Using Passpharse: Passphrase are means of remembering your password. This is when you use a favourite phrase or a sentence to generate a password. An example could be, “I go home every sunday” password “!goh0meeverysund4y”. You see from the above sentence, I created a nice good looking, long, secure and easy to remember password. I replaced the “I” with ! , the “o” with 0 and “a” with 4. Isn’t that easy?. Now tell me you’ll forget this kind of long password.
4. Renew passwords: Try your best to change your password frequently say every 3 weeks.