How To Create Secure Passwords

Call it the perils of a healthy virtual life, but if you are someone who spends an hour or two everyday on the internet, it is quite likely that you use more than a few online services from social networking and email to cloud storage and net banking that require you to log in with a password.

Most people employ a single passcode for all their accounts, but that could spell disaster. If even one of your accounts is hacked, all your other online properties stand to be at risk. It is therefore recommended that you use a strong, unique password for each service.

For a good password

Make sure it is at least seven to eight characters long. The longer the better. Avoid names, birth dates and anniversaries of loved ones, pets, phone numbers, favourite film stars and rock stars. Avoid words that you can find in the dictionary.

Include upper and lower case alphabets, numerals, as well as special characters (!@ #$% ^&*). Combine two completely different words to create your password. For example, you could combine the chemical oxygen with say the name of toothpaste Closeup.

Better still; separate the two with a number. So youll get oxygen24Closeup. To make your password tougher to guess, replace the o with 0. So your password then becomes 0xygen24Cl0seup. And since you have to create a different password for each of your online properties, if its Gmail, add a G to your password. Or if its for Hotmail, you can make it H0xygen24Cl0seup.

If youre still drawing a blank, you might want to consider free password-making services such as passwordsgenerator. net or www. strongpasswordgenerator. org. Using these tips and tricks, create unique codes for all your web properties.

However, all this effort will amount to absolutely nothing if you click Yes when your browser asks if it should remember your login details and passwords. For instance, if you save your net banking account details on your laptop, your eightyear-old son could inadvertently log in. Worse still, what happens if your laptop is misplaced or stolen

So how do you remember all your different passwords

Simple. Use a dedicated password manager programs that save all your passwords in an encrypted form so that no one, except you, can access them. Of course, youll need to remember one master password to access all those others.

LASTPASS:

LastPass is a tool that works with all major web browsers and is accessible through a browser widget. Add all your accounts details and encrypt them with a master LastPass password. After that, regardless of which service you access, LastPass will log in for you with a single click. A premium upgrade includes native mobile apps for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Android, WebOS (Palm) and Symbian, along with additional options and priority support. Get it from: lastpass. com

KEEPASS:

This open source software is similar to LastPass, but not as simple to use. However, it has one big advantage. KeePass has a portable version, which means you can carry your password data in a USB drive and use it on any computer. Get it from: keepass. info/download. html

PASSPACK:

This application is a web-only password manager. This means all your passwords are saved in an encrypted form on its servers. The advantage of using Pass-Pack is that it frees a user from a specific machine and all passwords can be used on any computer that is connected to the web. Get it from: www. passpack. com/en/products