How secure is your password? How long and strong is it? A good password is one that you can remember but a great password is one that is impossible to remember due to its complexity.
As tempting as it is to use simple phrases, names or dates, you might live to regret it when savvy criminals with sophisticated brute force cracking capabilities suss out your credentials and clean you out.
A strong password has 10 – 15 characters comprising uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols.
Free Password Generators
There are many free online tools that spit out random character strings. The data is generated client-side using javascript, meaning the sites themselves do not store any data.
https://strongpasswordgenerator.com
https://lastpass.com/generatepassword.php
If you do not trust these sites, you can instead literally mash the keyboard while tapping the shift key to produce an equally nonsensical mixture of keyboard characters.
Storing Your Passwords
Remembering the passwords is not the objective. It is advised that you store passwords with login credentials in a text/word document on a USB drive. Hide it and keep it safe. Have a backup of this passwords document.
Logging into a service only requires that you highlight, copy and paste the password from the text document into a website login form.
Alternatively, there are online password services which store credentials in a sort of digital vault. You only then have to remember a single master password to unlock access to all your passwords.
How do you store your usernames and passwords? Please reply with any scenarios not covered in the poll.
— Small Biz Geek (@SmallBizGeekUK) January 22, 2017