Following the hacking of several HBO social media accounts and the theft of episodes and content from their flagship series, Game of Thrones, we wonder: are their passwords secure? This is the age-old debate about passwords, and the most commonly used passwords last year, from most to least common in the top 10, were: 123456, 123456789, qwerty, 12345678, 111111, 1234567890, 1234567, password, 123123, and 987654321. But how can we easily create or maintain a secure password that we'll remember?
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How to have a secure password?
The longer a password is, the harder it is for someone else to crack it. The number of characters determines how quickly a password can be discovered. A strong password of at least twelve characters is generally recommended , a fairly high and secure level. Using city names or pet names is insecure. Some passwords, even if very long, are absurd because password cracking software can easily identify them. These tools are programmed to detect patterns, such as '1234567890987654321'. It's a lot of numbers, but the level of security is extremely poor because it lacks basic logic.
The best option to have a good password is to mix letters, numbers, uppercase, lowercase and symbols. Added to the twelve characters we will have a very secure password. These three factors discussed are the basis for having a password. We review them: twelve characters minimum, use names of cities, pets or consecutive numbers and mix numbers, uppercase, lowercase and symbols.
Use a phrase as a password
A great option is to use a phrase or set phrase as a secure password . Bruce Schneider, a security expert, recommended this relatively simple method of creating a password based on a specific phrase. This allows us to use a famous event that happened on a particular day or something important, such as the place and date of our wedding or the birth of a child.
Example: ' AMD launched the AMD RX Vega 64 on August 14, 2018 '. The pattern we would develop, for example, is: 'AMDlalasAMDVe64elpa14deagde2018'. As we can see, we cut some words, taking the first two letters from many, and we end up with a highly secure password that will surely take a long time to crack.
You can use the combination that you like the most and on the topic that interests you the most. Ideally this should be a private and personal event to prevent you from being able to guess using a public event.
Meaningless phrases
If you're looking for something different, you can opt for using words that have no connection to each other or nonsensical but funny phrases that are easy to remember. An example would be 'RajoyWonNobelAstrophysics'. It's a funny, nonsensical, and very surreal phrase that's easy to remember and a strong candidate for a secure password. The drawback of this method is that it could be forgotten if you don't have a good memory or guessed using dictionaries.
There's the PAO method, which is much better and was developed by engineers at Cernegie Mallon University. It stands for 'person, action, and object,' making it a fairly simple mnemonic and one of the best we can use. ' AsaltadorminaconunratonCorsairenBelchite ?' It doesn't really make much sense, but it's quite funny. The concepts can be unrelated or even nonsensical. There are many options, and it's all a matter of imagination and remembering.
Advanced method to have a strong password for people with good memory
The good thing about these methods to have a secure password is that they are relatively simple and we can remember with some ease. But it's not worth just one. We must have several, ideally one for each site or for several, but no more than five. This is because the same thing can happen as in Pordede, the content download website, which was hacked and the passwords of the users were stolen and sold on the network, therefore, our security would be useless if they all have the same password.
A good option is to have a group of passwords, similar or with the same base, but with different names or moments and make small variations. We can choose animals, cities or foods that we like as a base and combine them to create secure passwords. It is also recommended, from time to time, to change them, being able to rotate the passwords between the different pages, something that increases the security of the websites we use.
Does using a password manager help?
You can use a password manager if you are always on the same PC. Firefox and Chrome currently use native password managers, and you can sign in to keep your passwords across devices. They generate highly secure random and meaningless passwords for you, but you don't remember them.