A quick and painless guide to better passwords

Whether you think about it or not your password is extremely important. It is a (hopefully) unique combination that is simple for you to remember but hard for someone else to figure out. Here are a few simple tips for making stronger passwords and securing your accounts.

• Don't use the same password for every website. As inconvenient as it is to remember a large number of passwords, if someone figures out one password, they don't have access to your whole life.
• Don't use personal information. A lazy password is easy to crack. If you use your username as your password or your own name, chances are your account is vulnerable. Hackers will try to attack your account based on obvious information. The more less related the password is to your account, the better.
• Do use long passwords. Short passwords are easy to remember, but long passwords take much longer to crack. An eight digit password with numbers and characters has a total of 4.83E14 number of combinations, whereas a password with 16 digits has 8.61E28 combinations. That's 80 with 28 zeroes after it.

 Here is a basic step by step guide to stronger passwords.

1. Think of a word or phrase that is over 10 digits long. For example, I will use the phrase "attractivelogs"
2. Capitalize random letters: "aTtractIVElogs"
3. Add symbols and numbers: "!!0aTtractIVE&logs0!!"
4. Write down your new password and enjoy peace of mind.

The example I used would take 39 quadrillion years to crack, and was not detected as being a common word or password.

Even if you skip adding lots of random symbols to your passwords, simply using numbers and capitalizing your passwords will make them more secure. If nothing else, just make sure that you are sure of the websites you use and don't believe anything you read on the internet if it asks for your password.

-Daniel