What is a "Secure Password"?

Passwords have been around forever. You use them to log into everything you access online.

Is your password secure?

We used to be able to create a 3-5 character passwords without any complexity and this password was good. Nowadays with everyone having an online presence creating a secure password will ensure your accounts aren't compromised. So what is a "Secure Password" exactly.

A secure password is between 8 - 16 characters long and includes upper case letters, lowercase letters, a number, and a special character. You start to think though, "How am I ever going to remember this!?!"

Well there are several solutions but right now we will talk about mnemonics (neh-mon-nics). Mnemonics is defined as, "the study and development of systems for improving and assisting the memory." You might remember this from school. For example, in IT, there are the 7 layers of the OSI model:

Application
Presentation
Session
Transport
Network
Data Link
Physical

We used the first character of each word to to write out a simple sentence that was easier to remember.
"All People Seem To Need Data Processing"

The same can be applied to passwords. Do you read poetry? Do you have a favorite book or phrase that stands out to you? You can use this to create a secure password. Let's try it out.

I enjoy poetry so I will base my example off of that. One of my favorite poems is The Tyger by William Blake.
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger)

We will use just one of his stanzas to create our password:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

With this we can use the first or even second character in every word to create a password:

ttbbitfotn (first character in each word)
yyurnhofhi (second character)

This doesn't seem very secure though so we have to salt it up a bit using our secure password rules, so we can for example do:

TtbBitfoTn
uppercase and lowercase but still not secure enough, lets pepper it some more:

1TtbB2itfoTn!
13 characters long, uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers and a special character.

With the above password I only used the first 2 lines of the stanza and already created an easy to remember password. If I ever forget the password I know it was based off the poem so by reading the poem it will help me to remember this password.

Thank you for choosing Pacific Software Publishing inc., your Dreamersi provider.
Technicians are standing by Monday - Friday 9am - 6pm (PST) ready to assist your technical issues. We can be reached at (425) 957-0808 or 1-800-232-3989

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.