Chapter 8: Passwords and how to swing it

I obviously have to be very careful here. I'm going to tell you how to construct a password that will be easy for you to remember, which will effectively give people a formula I use for creating passwords.

But the positives outweigh the cons so here goes:

How many of you have passwords written down on paper stuck around your monitor?
Most of you I reckon. This isn't a bad thing, it will certainly prevent you from the cyber criminal. But then you leave yourself open to the opportunist. The dodgy heating engineer that uses his camera phone to take a pic of the paper.

The best defence is to not have it written down anywhere. Memorise it. But that is too hard I hear you say. Not really. Here is how you do it:

First of all MOST websites require a password 8 to 16 characters long. So the first thing you need to do is think of something from your past that no one else will know.
For an example I have deicided to choose my first lego set. So the example I will use is lego8845
As you can see, we have four numbers and four letter. This is a medium strength password. And we still have 8 characters left available. So what you could do now is choose 2 letters from something memorable. Say your house name is Mongoose. Use the M and the E. We will put one at the start, and one at the end as capitals. So we now have:
Mlego8845E as a password.
Now we should all know that using the same password on many sites is silly. If someone gets your details for one site, they have access to multiple sites. So what you need to do now is decide where you want to put 2 extra letters into the password. Now many people know that lego is an acronym of two different words so we will split the word between e and g. Now the extra 2 letters are the only things that will ever change from password to password. So lets say we are creating a password for hotmail. We take the H and the L from hotmail, and add them to our password thus:
MleHLgo8845E
And for Google:
MleGEgo8845E
iwantoneofthose.com:
MleIEgo8845E
And so on.
As you can see, if someone gets hold of one password, there is no pattern in that one password to be able to crack other websites.
The reason I write this is because I see so many poor passwords, when it is so easy to write a decent one.
As I write this the most common passwords include:
password
letmein
donttellanyone
12345678
123123123
qwertyuiop

So a lot of people don't need to be hacked. Their passwords can be guessed.

Oh and if a site asks for a symbol in the password, just put a hyphon between the site identifier letters. For example:
MleH-Lgo8845E
I hope this helps people.