Passwords and how to pick one!!

If you have come here in need of picking a good password?

You are in luck

Now you may be wondering why you need to put so much thought into a password, I will first explain why picking a secure password is very important and also help you detemine an easy one to remember.

Lets first go over why you need a good password,

For the most part we are pretty safe from someone randomly guessing our password and getting to our personal stuff.

This is not what you want to protect yourself from, you really need to protect yourself from someone you already know or someone thats familiar to you or your family.

Why be afraid of your family or friend?

• For the most part you are pretty safe, the odds of someone trying to login to your email without knowing you is really not going to happen. As I'm sure your password is already a familiar phrase or name of someone/thing you already know. So what I'm trying to point out here is that most people are victims of someone that has knowlege of you.

• Now there is another way to be a victim and thats to do with you providing the info needed to be comprmissed. Like a phishing email asking for your information, EX: there has been reports of fraudulant activity and they need to verify you are Mr/Mrs jones.

  So to avoid this kind of attact never email anyone your personal info by hitting reply in this sort of email. If you are really concerned, call the place of business from a known good number. Not from a number in any email asking for your personal info. If you do not respond the worst that will happen is they shut down an account you need and then you call/email them to get resolution.

• So this kind of brings me back full circle, you see it's not just a random person trying to use some sort of decryption software trying to break your password to get to your personal info. It's more like someone who has knowledge of you or knows you. So friends, Family, and acquaintances. Plus the random emails wich we all get, telling us that we have been a victim and we need to provide our info to be safe. both of these are called social hacking.

• Social hacking is what we all need to be aware of and this is why i'm writing this to make sure that we can better protect our personal info.

Choosing a password

Lets cover some simple things most people already do and work from the simple things and make them better. No need in reinventing the wheel, as the theory is good, we just need to change from wood to rubber.

• Lets say your name is Brian, your wife/girlfriends name is Brenda and you have a pet named spot.
• You grew up in steel, Ohio. Your home address is 2370 home street.
• Now I do beleive that for the most part we tend to use passwords with familiar things as remembering all those different passwords is hard enough without adding new things into our already busy lives.
• Now the method I use can be applied to any password you already have and the above examples are just that, examples.
• In this example i'm using the password brendaohio.
• This is how I work my magic with passwords, first thing I do is decide what letter and where I want to have a capital, so I will change the above password to brenDaohio. As you can see this has just become a little more secure. As we now have one capital letter, you may think this is good enough. Well it might be but lets make this as strong as possible, so next I like to find letters and numbers that look the same so the next step is to change brenDaohio to brendaohi0, now we can do more like br3nDaohi0. Did you notice I changed the letter e to number 3 and the last letter o to the number 0. As this in my opion is better than most passwords, there are some other things we can do. The first letter of ohio can also be changed. but rather than changing it to a 0 lets change it to a shift 0, so we end up with ). So the final password would be br3nDa)hi0. Not bad considering we just used some things from everyday life.

Lets go over how this works and how to keep the rule the same

• I first decide what letter I want to be a capital, we would not want to use the same convention as grammar so capitalising the first letter would be too expected, so I decided to capitalise the last consonant. So to keep it the same whenever you create a password find a rule and keep it the same for all your passwords. You could also use the first or last vowel.

• Then I look at the words and think of the letters I can replace with numbers, so e can be 3, o can be 0, b can be 8 and so on. Just make sure you keep them the same as this will become your new password vocabulary and it needs to be consistent for it to work. So e will always be the number 3. So all you need to do is remember e is 3, so tree is really tr33.

• Now decide what number you want to change to a shift click, last number used, first number used. Again always use the same rule, trust me this will help in the long run and you will thank me when you need to remember a password you just created. In case you are wondering what I mean when I say shift click, the number stays the same just hold the shift button when you select that number. So the number 3 would be #. You can also use the wrtten version of a number like 3 would be three.

Conclusion

If after following these steps you still have an issue, feel free to post below and I will do my best to help.

The best advice I can leave you with is remember that it's someone we know (friend of a friend, colleague, neigbour, ect...) that will most likely be the one doing this. Or an email asking you for your personal info. So keep passwords to your self and never send personal indfo in an email as a reply to a request that you might be at risk, or they need to update your info.

Best of Luck.