Making Passwords

Everyone battles with making passwords

So lets look briefly at why we need to get to grips with them:

A password is something you know that no one else can guess, its your secret – because only you know it, you can prove to the computer, web site, etc, that’s its really you there. In some places, keeping your password secret is a legal requirement.

A computer can guess simple passwords in seconds! – however most systems have extra defences to slow them down!

• The secret can be a number, word, name or phrase.
  Unfortunately another computer can guess most of these very quickly so we must use a combination of those things
• A combination could use names, words and numbers
  • numbers 1234567890
  • lower and upper case abcd ABCD
  • special characters (symbols) £.$%-_+&()?@~!”
• Use things that mean something to you, all jumbled up!
• The more complicated the password the more secure (safe) it is
  1. Valuable information needs a very strong (complicated) password
  2. Ordinary information can have a strong or weaker password
  3. Non-private (expendable) information could even have a simple password (but be careful, and not bad passwords)
• Its not terrible if you have to write it down, but keep it in a safe place!