Most people who use the Internet today use passwords for one thing or another. Whether it’s to access an email account, or become a member of a popular site such as Myspace, Youtube, or Facebook and so forth. But how strong are your passwords? And are you safe from the bad guys who would love nothing more than to access your accounts’ and steal your personal information. A fast and simple rule for creating strong passwords is to insure that your passwords be at least 14 characters and contain symbols, numbers and upper and lowercase letters. The stronger your password, the less likely of you becoming a victim.

You’re probably thinking, “Well that’s all great, but my memory really sucks, I can’t remember long passwords and that’s why I use ‘abcdefg‘ for all my logins”. If remembering long passwords is a problem for you, one way to help you remember them is to create a cryptic word play with them. It goes something like this:

Take a sentence that is very familiar to you, for example “My Dog’s Name Is Buddy And He Is Eight Years Old”

What you do then is to take, as an example, the first letter of each word like this:

MDNIBAHIEYO

By itself the above password is weak, but it is easily remembered since it is identifiable as being the sentence “My Dog’s Name Is Buddy And He Is Eight Years Old” . The true strengthening of the password starts by substituting letters for numbers. For example, the letter ‘O’ could be substituted with a zero (0), the letter ‘I’ could be converted to a (1) and the letter ‘E’ could be a backward (3). Our new Password is now:

MDN1BAH13Y0

This password is now much stronger than the first, and still relatively easy to remember as long as you remember the sentence:

‘My Dog’s Name Is Buddy And He Is Eight Years Old’

Next, we’ll convert some letters to lowercase as follows:

Mdn1Bah13y0

All I’ve done here is to leave the letter ‘M’ capitalized, since it represents the first letter of the sentence, it gets a capital. The rest of letters get turned to lowercase, except the ‘B’ which is the name of Buddy and a proper noun, proper nouns stay in capitals.

‘Mdn1Bah13y0′ on its own is a very strong password, but if you want to get extreme, try adding some special characters to the password. For example, add a special character every three letters or digits.

Mdn@1Ba@h13@y0

Most bad guys will just move on to the next victim and leave you alone. Although there are no guarantees in life, a password like ‘Mdn@1Ba@h13@y0‘ will keep you secure longer and better.

If all this information seems like a lot of trouble to you, think of how much trouble it would be when Dr. Evil gets his Claws on your Information.

Microsoft offers a very good password checker that will check the strength of your password, you can access online at http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/password/checker.mspx

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