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4 Ways to Make Your Password Safer

This article is more than 10 years old.

At the end of the day, there's only one thing between by personal data and the rest of humanity: a small little collection of numbers and letters that I use as my password. I've put a lot of faith in those numbers and letters, and it's probably misplaced.

At Gizmodo, Rachel Swaby explains why the vast majority of people are securing their lives with a phrase that's far too easy to break. She outlines it here:

The thing to understand is that the biggest threat to your security isn't some creep sitting in front of your email login screen, randomly bruteforcing his way into your account. Nope, you're up against computers that can run thousands of encrypted passwords by dictionaries of several languages, everything in the World Fact Book, and Wikipedia in a matter of minutes.

And the setup that makes cracking weak passwords a cinch is seriously nothing special. A journalist at the Tech Herald named Steve Ragan was able to crack over 80,000 encrypted passwords the AntiSec movement published on the Internet in just five hours with a $300 off-the-shelf computer and free downloadable software.

It's a terrifying prospect, and one that most people would rather not think about. But there are ways to make your precious passcode safer, and here are a few good tips.

Stop Spreading it Around:

A lot of people use one password for every application they use online, and while it makes it remembering the thing a much easier prospect, it makes it much easier to crack, and much more useful once it's in the wrong hands. You leave traces on every password-protected website you go to, and the more of those that one phrase begins to accumulate, the easier it will be to crack.

Get it Off Your Computer:

If you've got your password in a spreadsheet or some kind of file on your computer, it's just sitting there in plain sight for anyone that wants to take a peek. If you really can't remember it without a bit of help, here's a good solution: a piece of paper in the desk. Hackers almost never check the desk.

More Complicated, Always:

This one is a no brainer, but it's an important one. for every extra digit that goes onto your password, the degree of difficulty in cracking it goes up exponentially. So throw on some more. Parentheses, extra numbers, strange symbols and anything else that doesn't follow logical progression will make your password safer (using numbers instead of letters doesn't help, though -- hacking programs know that one). Any expert in the article recommends coming up with a mnemonic device based on te first line of your favorite song to make a string of letters that will make sense only to you

Use a Password Manager Service

The problem is, many of the things that make our password easier to crack are the very same things that allow us to manage them on our own. The best solution here is the same reason we needed the password in the first place: computers are just better at most things. So the best thing to do here is to get a password management program that will remember large numbers of complicated and nonsensical passwords for you. They're cheap, easy and effective.