Set your password wisely, to remember them easily, for managing multiple accounts securely?

Most popular (and wrong) passwords

An average Internet citizen will have Facebook, Twitter, probably Pinterest or LinkedIn account – and then your Gmail, Yahoo mail, your Internet banking ID, your favourite forum account and the list goes on.

It turns out that most of us choose a common password for every site – what is the implication ? Well, if somebody gains leverage on one of your account.

It’s true that human brain can only process and memorize certain amount of data – that’s why people tend to choose easy password to remember. And it’s wrong, totally WRONG !

Here are the worst and unfortunately most popular 25 passwords in 2012:

#              Password                Change from 2011
1               password                 Unchanged
2               123456                    Unchanged
3               12345678                Unchanged
4               abc123                     Up 1
5               qwerty                     Down 1
6               monkey                    Unchanged
7               letmein                     Up 1
8               dragon                     Up 2
9               111111                    Up 3
10             baseball                   Up 1
11             iloveyou                   Up 2
12             trustno1                   Down 3
13             1234567                  Down 6
14             sunshine                  Up 1
15             master                      Down 1
16             123123                    Up 4
17             welcome                  New
18             shadow                    Up 1
19             ashley                      Down 3
20             football                     Up 5
21             jesus                        New
22             michael                     Up 2
23             ninja                         New
24             mustang                   New
25             password1               New

Is your password in the list ? If so, read on for my suggestions.

So, how to set password wisely ?

This suggestion below is totally based on my personal experience and I shall not bear any responsibility – OK I am done with disclaimer and if you’re still here, let’s move on:

1.  Separate your important accounts from unimportant ones.
For me, I’ll set a separate password for my junk account (forums, secondary Facebook account, Yahoo mail - sorry Yahoo, your spamming filter doesn’t work !).

For important account such as credit card, Paypal, Amazon or banking-related, I’ll pick a different and much longer password.

That way, at least the chance of getting my credit card hacked reduced by 50%.

2. Set your password long & complex enough for hackers
Every password can be crack given enough time with brute-force.  According to the calculation at this page, at brute-force speed of 1B guesses/ second (cluster servers, super computing node, or a botnet networks) :

• It’ll be matter of minutes or hours to crack if your password is just pick from alphanumeric values.
• But it’ll take 83.5 days to crack if your password include all possible characters.
  which are:
  0123456789AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz <SP>!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~
  

Password	Class of Attack
Length	Combinations	Class A	Class B	Class C	Class D	Class E	Class F
2	9,216	Instant	Instant	Instant	Instant	Instant	Instant
3	884,736	88½ Secs	9 Secs	Instant	Instant	Instant	Instant
4	85 Million	2¼ Hours	14 Mins	1½ Mins	8½ Secs	Instant	Instant
5	8 Billion	9½ Days	22½ Hours	2¼ Hours	13½ Mins	1¼ Mins	8 Secs
6	782 Billion	2½ Years	90 Days	9 Days	22 Hours	2 Hours	13 Mins
7	75 Trillion	238 Years	24 Years	2½ Years	87 Days	8½ Days	20 Hours
8	7.2 Quadrillion	22,875 Years	2,287 Years	229 Years	23 Years	2¼ Years	83½ Days

83.5 days on a super computing node to crack a 8-character password ? So let’s make your password AT LEAST 8-CHARACTER LONG !

3. But how to make it memorable to you ?
”Memorable” is a very subjective term and rely heavily on your personal preferences, so I would introduce only a few techniques from Wikihow – find out which one suit you most  !

How to store my password securely

Most importantly: do NOT write it down and keep it somewhere – you probably spend more time to find where do you store that piece of paper

Instead, with the popularity of today’s smartphone, make use of it: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/pictures-story/662-3-best-mobile-password-managers.html

My personal favourite is LastPass – I only wish that them implement finger-print authentication so that I can use it safer on iPhone 5S .

So that’s it – hope you find your own way to create secure and memorable password folks !
Last but not least, even if you come up with the most difficult passwords to crack, you’re still prone “social engineering” !