Comments on: Complex Passwords: Don’t Go Online Without Them

By: valerie

valerie — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:22:04 +0000

greatidea

By: ND

ND — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:38:39 +0000

Enjoyed your piece.

By: Lisa

Lisa — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:37:32 +0000

Inside jokes are a good idea, but isn’t that like paraphrasing anyway? As long as you remember the password it will work for you.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 16:18:49 +0000

I agree with pierce. Why not use a passphrase instead of a password? The entire sentence would take much (MUCH) longer to brute force out, and being a sentence, even harder to guess. I personally like to use inside jokes as passphrases. They’re easy to remember and hardly anyone would be able to connect the sentence to me.

By: Gina

Gina — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:37:39 +0000

The only way to remember a 16 letter password is the example that the author gave. Thanks for a good piece of info.

By: pierce

pierce — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:33:37 +0000

If you are thinking of a phrase like ” My brown dog Ralph has 7 fleas.”, why not just use ” My brown dog Ralph has 7 fleas.” as your password?

MbdRh7f contains 7 characters, and can be cracked in less than a second by any modern password cracking software. Sure, you can throw in some numbers and funky punctuation, and make sure not to spell all the words quite right if you want to harden it up a bit, but having a password longer than 16 characters is far more important than using obscure characters.

By: ND

ND — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:13:09 +0000

I agree with the previous comment! Thanks!

By: IcyCucky

IcyCucky — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:09:03 +0000

This is a great article, with important helpful tips!