Habitually Good

Disclaimer: I understand that most people who visit this site probably don’t have the problem with keeping weak passwords, so feel free to skip this one; but just in case, you don’t know what I am talking about, it might be worth your while to read it.

Not too much time passes before I hear from someone or another that their mail account was hacked, or their messenger account was compromised, or something like that. They can’t understand what happened. While there are plenty of ways through which a hacker can gain access to your account, one of the most common is by guessing the password that you use.

By guessing the password, it means that the hacker is using a program which will try thousands of possibilities to guess your password. Well, if your password is easy to guess, then you are in trouble, because the hacker will have it sooner or later.

So, what can you do?

The answer is not to keep weak passwords. There are may ways to ensure this. The Internet is full of good articles around this topic.

While it is possible to think of a really random and hard to crack password such as IE^dO#12o2s7, it is also almost impossible to remember such a password. Passwords have to be such that they should be easy to remember. Here are some ideas that you can use:

• Do not put any personal information in your password (name, phone number, etc.)
• Do not use the same password for all your accounts.
• Try and have a complex password which is a mix of letters, numbers, and special characters.
• Try to have at least 8 characters in a password.

So, how do we make it easy to remember?

• One trick is to choose a phrase which you will never forget, such as: “I grew up in Philippines”. Now take this phrase and add some numbers and characters in it and remove the spaces: “9Igrewupin@Philippines!”. Now that is a nice password – it is easy to remember since it states a simple fact – the only thing that you have to remember is where you put the numbers and the special characters.
• But you can’t go about using the same password for every account, so what you can do is use the same base password, but change it a little to reflect the account for which you are choosing the password – so using the example above, for my account on Yahoo I would choose “9Igrewupin@Yahoo!”; or for my Google account I would choose “9Igrewupin@Google!”.

The real important thing is this: there are times when we have to share our passwords, so you should never share your password directly. First you should go and change your password to something simpler, then share it. Once the person you are sharing it with is done, then go and change the password back to the original – this has multiple advantages – if you are using a pattern such as described above, it is not revealed – another is that if you have the same password for every account, you don’t show that.

If your passwords are not strong, you should change them all today. So, that you are not ruing tomorrow the fact that your account got hacked.

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