Online passwords are our first line of defense against cyber thieves, says Sven Mogelgaard, owner of Byte Slaves Consulting. Using a weak password is like leaving your front door wide open. You WILL be sorry sooner rather than later. Here’s an example of how to creating powerful passwords that are strong yet easy to remember.
Start with something you know that’s not easy to find. Maybe your cousin’s middle name. Then pick something else totally unrelated, like your best friend’s street address. Now misspell them and/or change letters to numbers. It’s good to use random capitalization as well just to keep things interesting.
Let’s say your cousin Bob’s middle name is Eugene and your best friend Sue lives on 12th Street. You could create a password like this: UgeNeXIIth. Your password hint could be “Bob + Sue’s Roman addy.” I like to use things like my favorite songs, TV shows and authors for variety.
So now you can create all kinds of fun passwords, but how do you remember which ones go where? There are a couple of inexpensive programs I recommend. Both store all your private information securely. First is RoboForm. This nifty program saves your information in an encrypted file that can only be accessed by your password. You can optionally save the info online (which allows you to access it from any browser). You can even download the info to a flash drive or get an app for your smartphone so you always have access to the data.
The other program I like is SplashID. It works very much like RoboForn, but lacks the Web access feature. It’s simple to set up and use and lets you keep track of a wide range of confidential information.
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