Securing Your Accounts With Well-Crafted Passwords

Surprisingly enough, password security actually is important. Learn how to get the most out of your passwords.

In the past I've never really paid much attention to security issues when it comes to user names and passwords. Frankly I figured it was all a lot of overblown hype. This led to an unfortunate incident that involved my website being attacked, apparently by a skillful youth with a propensity for mischief.

The main security flaw with my website was probably the simple fact that the username and password were exactly the same. Granted I did realize that this wasn't highly intelligent but I didn't have the power to change it myself, and I didn't think it really mattered enough to bother about it. Having an identical username and password is a massive "no-no" in computer security. Your username and password should not even be related along the same line of thought. A username of "Dragon" and a password of "Fire" is not a secure combination.

For maximum security, passwords should not be cohesive words or phrases and should not be too obviously related to something like your birthday or the birthday of someone close to you. Personal information is one of the first things used when people attempt to break passwords. Having a password of "Password" is indeed humorous and ironic but it is not in the least bit secure. A "brute force" password hacking technique involves using certain rules and guidelines to take a guess at possible passwords and generally works through a dictionary of sorts, trying combinations of possible words and common characters. Your best bet at creating a secure password is to pick a random collection of letters, numbers, and symbols, including varying case changes (in a password the letter "a" is not the same as the letter "A", so alternating at random between upper and lower case will increase the difficulty encountered in cracking your password). Selecting a sequence of characters on the keyboard (such as "asdf" or, worse, "1234") definitely does not create a secure, random password.

Having symbols in your password is an easy way to greatly increase security. These are the special characters accessed by holding the "Shift" key and pressing one of the numbers at the top of the keyboard. If you want to truly expand your arsenal of special characters, try holding down the "alt" key and pressing a combination of numbers on the num pad (the rectangular collection of numbers on the right hand side of most keyboards) then release "alt". For example, holding "alt" and pressing numbers, 1 then 6 then 8 and releasing "alt" will give the character "