Good password management

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Perhaps the single most important thing to remember when creating a new password is to make it hard to guess, but easy to remember. That’s easier said than done, but following some basic guidelines will likely help you become more secure.

A good password is any combination of letters and numbers that cannot be found in a dictionary. Your password should be at least six to eight characters long and should not have any personal information. A combination of letters, numbers and symbols will work best. Make sure you use a mix of capital and lower-case letters to make your password even more difficult to crack.


Try using the first letter from every word in your favorite expression, line in a story, poem or movie. For example, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," could lead you to the following password: PnAttMBtC.

You could choose a word as your password, but then substitute similar looking numbers for letters in your passwords. For example, football may become F00t8a77 or sneakers may become 5n3ak3r5. Not every number needs to be associated with a letter.

You might come up with a keystroke mapping system. For example, if you choose to do an "upper-left" keystroke system, you would choose the letter to the upper-left of the actual key you wanted. So if your password was qwert, your new password would be 12345.

There are several techniques you can employ to make your existing passwords more secure. Whatever method you choose, you should remember to make it an easy and understandable method so you will have stronger pawwords without much more effort.

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