One thought on “Insecure Passwords”

1. I’ve been using a similar technique for many years and it works. What I would add to the author’s advice is to allow yourself to be inspired by the website when choosing a password. Just let your mind wander a bit while pondering its title or contents until something familiar comes to mind. For example, if I was creating a password for this place I might choose fmtTM12, which is based on “fly me to the moon”, a phrase from an old Sinatra song that just jumped into my head.

   (By capitalizing the last two letters and adding one or more numbers you expand the range of characters, which can thwart some types of password attacks. You can add punctation marks to expand it further.)

   The point of this approach is to make your phrase-based password more memorable, by basing them on phrases that are already locked into your memory. I’m able to create a different password for every site I use and still manage to remember most of them most of the time. (I always write or type them down, too). I’ve even on occasion been able to re-create a password that I had more or less forgotten by repeating the mind-wandering exercise and then trying variations of my usual caps/numbers pattern.

   This approach may produce slightly weaker passwords than what the author’s does, but the trade-off is that you can have more of them and still easily remember them. Either way, the important thing is to get off using words as passwords.

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