In this day and age simple passwords can be worked out easily. Even a long word from a dictionary or a random set of numbers. Dictionary attacks and password crackers that use random sets of numbers could work these out easily. Brute force attacks will also try and use a combination of letters and numbers, so how do you try and make a password that's harder to crack?

As realitysquared stated if you use a password related to something you talk about a lot or are known to like it'll be obvious what your password could be. Even things like your background image, if you have a background image of a certain animal and you talk about them a lot people may guess you use it as your password. Because of this here's an article based around password production.

The absolute minimum number of figures used should be 8, even then this is not really that secure and you should aim for 12+ figures consisting of a combination of numbers, upper case and lower case letters and special characters. For many people remembering a password of this type would be very hard to remember, which effectively makes it hard to crack but useless to try and login.

As I read in a magazine recently (Micro Mart issue 935) mnemonics are very good to use as passwords. They seem pretty random and can be easily remembered via a phrase. Integrating then a few numbers to replace letters and some special characters resembling something your password can become very secure.

A mnemonic my dad always used to teach me to remember the order of planets was: My Very Elderly Mother Just Sleeps Until Night Passes giving MVEMJSUNP (Forget the fact that Pluto is now no longer a planet.). This on it's own looks pretty confusing and hard to remember but remembering the mnemonic helps you create a secure password.

Now to add some numbers MV3MJ5UNP1991. That's the mnemonic with my birth year. It's getting more secure but now let's change the case of certain letters. MveMjsunp1991, here I've kept the M's in upper case and moved all the others to lower case. Last but not least some special characters: MveMjsunp1991^_^. So now it has some special characters being a face made out of ^ and _. You can do anything any face: *_* -_- 0_o @_@ o_- any combination of characters will do. So there we go the password MveMjsunp1991^_^. Very hard to crack and uses a combination of upper/lower case letters, numbers and characters, it also consists of 16 characters. After a few times of typing it in you'll get used to it and remember it, whereas it might be difficult to crack.

Next week: how to create a more complicated and secure password for those of you who want stronger security.

DISCLAIMER: The passwords use are not mine and can not be used to access my account and so do not bother trying go do something better.