News sources are always talking
about the importance of using good passwords on the internet. Every time some
large company gets hacked and clear text passwords are leaked it
comes up again. The truth of the matter is, people are lazy. No matter how much
you tell them it's important they're still liable to set the password of every
account they have to something along the lines of 123456. 123456 is, believe it
or not, easy to guess.
The normally suggested method is to use a myriad of
passwords, a different one for each account. Naturally it is not as easy to
remember a bunch of passwords as it is to remember 1234656. Generally I've seen
people use the password reset tool constantly, write them down somewhere, or
use a password storing tool. Resetting your password all the time because you
can't remember it really is not very efficient. Writing them all down can work,
until you misplace it or it gets into the wrong hands. Password storage
software is very useful for a single computer; however you still run the risk
of losing the master password or having to access your account from another
computer. All these can potentially be
viable methods, however, as would be expected, I prefer the method I use most
often.
Rather than remembering a password, why not remember a
function? Here's an example:
If I were making a password for, say, facebook.com. There
are a lot of variables that you can pull out of a URL. For instance, facebook
has 8 letters, starts with F, ends with M, both
of which are also consonants. Naturally there are tons of options where
numbers and variables can be pulled from a word or address. This is going to be
a fairly simple example; I'm going to use the length of the word (8), whether or not the second letter
is a consonant, and the number of vowels.
The next thing you need is a base
"word." Your word can really just be a random string of letters but
for the sake of remembering it a word is easier. My word is going to be
Password, originality at its finest.
So the variables are:
The number of letters, a number.
The number of vowels, a number.
If the second letter is a consonant, true or false.
Next you take the variables and apply them to your
base word. I'm going to throw out the "O" in Password and
replace it with the number of letters times 2, If the number of vowels is
greater than four I'm going to add a question mark at the end, and if the
second letter is a vowel the third letter is replaced by the first.
So the password looks like:
Pa(first letter Y/N)ssw(# of letters X 2)rd(? Y/N)
And for the example of Facebook comes out looking
like:
Pafsw16rd?
Most every website will produce a
different password, Google makes Pagsw12rd, reddit makes Parsw12rd, etc.
The tl;dr of this is that you
should be able to use this method so you can remember one formula and let the
URL fill in the details.
Good luck!
Iris
