Choose a secure password and keep your passwords safe

How to choose a secure password and to keep the passwords safe is a challenge everybody using the Internet faces.

If you are like most Internet users, you have a plethora of different accounts at different sites. You do banking online, pay bills online and read personal email online. All these different accounts are protected by your password.

Let us examine the risk to these passwords

The password can be guessed by a person who knows you if the password is
The password can be cracked using automated password cracking tools. The time taken to crack a password has shrunk dramatically using Graphic Processing Units (GPU).

Believe it or not, there are hackers who offer services to crack into popular email accounts.
They can be sniffed while you are entering it on the site using tools like keyloggers
They can be lost at the site, either to hackers or theft or malicious employees. If you use the same password at multiple places, all your accounts are compromised if one of them is compromised.
You can forget the password

We will try to give you techniques by which you can choose a secure password and keep it safe. Your password should not be

Less than eight characters long
Based on a word or a phrase that anybody who knows you can guess.
Be based on a common dictionary word
Be the same for all sites

One technique for creating an easy to remember secure password

Take a sentence or a quote that you like.
From each of the words in the phrase extract the second letter or the first two letters or the last two letters. You get the drift
Now take the sequence of letters and add to it first and second letters of the name of the site that you are visiting
Add a sequence of numbers to it. You can keep on incrementing this sequence of numbers if you change the password periodically

Using this technique you will have a password that is easy to remember, is unique for each site and can be changed regularly.

Password Software

The other way to have secure passwords is to have totally random passwords for each site. However there is no way you will be able to remember the password for each site. There are password keeping software that can assist you with that.

Here are two free, open source software that allow you to do that.

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