Use this free tool to generate secure strong passwords that are harder to crack.
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://passwords-generator.org
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. As long as you have a combination of lowercase and uppercase characters with symbols, the password should be good enough.
Storing Your Strong 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 strong password from the text document into a website login form. It’s really as easy as that, but requires you be vigilante in this process. Don’t get lazy and start writing things down on bits of paper. It’s incompetent.
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.
I’ve never used one of those services because I just cannot bring myself to trust them. Privacy is a massive concern for all of us in this tech age, and yet, these online password storage services do get hacked and it’s been in the news many, many times.
Sending Your Strong Passwords
If you want to send the password to someone, use the free QuickForget tool. You can set the information you’re sending to be automatically destroyed after it’s been viewed a certain number of times or after so many hours.
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