Do you have a good password?

Password maintenance is a pain.  Anyone active on the network knows how difficult it is to keep track of passwords.  The temptation is to keep the same password for everything and keep it simple.  I've found that a service called Lastpass.com is a way to manage passwords with one login.  It helps, but isn't perfect.

Did you know that the most common password is "Password1"?  (Oops -- did I just guess your password?)  Read this very interesting article on the topic of password complexity.

The Lastpass.com site I mentioned above allows you to generate very complex passwords for your various sites, then it keeps track of those complex passwords for you.  Pretty handy, really, unless you need to manually enter those passwords.  An alternative I've used is to create a password that has something static and something that varies, but both are easy to remember yet hard to guess.  Let me explain.

Take a phrase that describes something about you, such as "I hate green beans".  Put the first letters of each word into a set of characters: "Ihgb".  This becomes your static part of your password.  Tack on the month and year, such as "Mar12" to create a very long and complex password "IhgbMar12" that is easy to remember but hard to guess.  Every first of the month, you change the month/year part and update your sites' passwords.  Periodically vary the static part (ex: "My dog has fleas" becomes "Mdhf").

OK, maybe changing your passwords every month seems overkill.  Make the variable part quarterly (ex: "Ihgb1Q12" for Jan-Mar 2012).

The key is to take the time to change your password regularly so it isn't so vulnerable to hacking.

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