Anagram Your Passwords!

Remember those puzzles that require you to rearrange letters to make words and phrases?  They take a sequence of letters like alarepirctl and you manipulate them to become the word caterpillar.  Why not take that game, give yourself a few rules and create your passwords in the same way?

How to do it:

1. Take an 8-character minimum word or phrase as your seed word
2. Use a numeric replacement (such as those listed under common replacements) or add a number
3. Use a special character replacement or add a special character

Expiring Passwords

Can you answer with “in the last 3 months” to any of these?

When was the last time you changed your password for …

1. your primary email account?
2. your bank account?
3. Facebook?
4. eBay?
5. iTunes?
6. WordPress?

If the answer is:

Password Tip #4 – Self-imposed limitations

I was going to make this a video blog, unfortunately I do not have any sponsors yet and cannot afford to buy the ad-on to allow for video!  If you or anyone else you know is interested in sponsoring this blog, please leave me a comment and I’ll start the process!

I had my 13-month old daughter on my lap the other day as I was trying to enter a password  and realized that I had to do the whole thing with my left hand!  I hold her in my right arm and am not able to reach the keyboard with my right hand otherwise, she presses keys on the keyboard!

Imposing limitations decreases the overall complexity of a password by reducing the available pool of characters used.  It is therefore highly recommended to add length to your password!  My rule of thumb is to increase password length by one character every 4 elements removed from the available pool.

How to create your password:

1. Identify your limitation

Machine-generated passwords

There are many websites and programs that can generate a password of any length and complexity.  Here are some of the pros and cons for adopting these passwords for day-to-day use.

Pros

• Uniqueness - the site/product is generating the passwords on-the-fly

Using a Seed Word to Generate Category Passwords

 I highly recommend organizing your online accounts into categories.  (If you need a refresher, here’s my original post.)

For sites which fall into categories 8 – 11, it is okay for your passwords to be similar to one another.  However, they should each have at least 3 unique characters and be no shorter than 8 characters long.  It is only for websites in these categories that I would advocate using the method outlined below.

This method uses a number mapping schema.