How to create a good password?

Password is one of many things that important in online activity. It’s everywhere, even in e-mail, network login, websites, etc. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of person who don’t want to bother about creating a good password. Simply, I define a good password as a password that hard to decode or crack (by brute force or by guessing – social engineering). I can give some tips to create a good password.

1. Make sure the length of the password is at least 6 character, the longer the better.
2. Don’t use your user name, birth date, house address, phone number, or other hints that identify you. Instead, use a combination of letters, numbers, even symbols to create a password.
3. If you want to, you can use password generator programs, as long you can remember the password, or a program that can check how good your password is. Maybe I will try to make that program.
4. Change default password immediately. Sometimes there are some program that has a default password (like CMS, or DBMS, online registration, etc), as soon you can login to your account, you must changed your default password. Because there are some worries that the default password sometimes easy to crack, even by guessing (for example user: root and password: root, or user: admin and password: admin, etc).
5. Don’t save your plain text password anywhere, if you can remember it, it will be better. Just imagine if someone see that file or notes and use that to login into your account, it would be terrible.

Well, there are other tips which is much better than mine, but this is an example of a simple one.

~ by p&u on April 19, 2008.