Tips to Manage Passwords

The first rule of thumb on how to manage passwords is to forget about using your birthday as a password. Ok, it is easy to remember (after all, who forgets the day that he was born?), but it is also very easy to find for any cracker or hacker that lurks the web. Consider that your birthday is publicly available.

It can be found in your blog, your driver license, your Hi5 page or even at MSN Live.

The same goes for simple number combinations like 1234 or 7890. These are the first passwords that a hacker will use in order to penetrate your security. And forget about using words like your second name or your grandmother's surname. That information can be found quite easily by someone who knows were to look.

You should also avoid names of people and places. Crackers utilize programs that store complete dictionaries in their database. That way the program tries every word that it can find; even something as complex as the name of one of the characters of Lord of the Rings can be easily cracked. After all, the cracker only needs to download the encyclopedia of Middle Earth to his database and that's it!

Which is the answer, then? The best way to assure yourself that your password won't be discovered is by creating a master password which combines numbers and letters. For example, 03itnb23sa; difficult, isn't it? How can someone remember a combination of names and numbers that have no meaning?

A practical way to do it is by creating a sentence and combining it with a particular date. An example of a sentence can be: My first child was born in the year two thousand and six. If you pick up the first word of each letter you have: mfcwbityttas. However, you can simplify it by using numbers. Then the new word will be mfcwbity2006.

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With this technique you can create a huge and complex master password. However, there are occasions in which you can't use the master password. It may be that it is too long, or maybe you have to use letters and no numbers; or numbers and no letters.

Finally, if you have too much passwords and want to use a digital database for storing them, then you should use password protect files in order to store them. However, you should be careful with the type of archive that you are going to use.

Microsoft Excel, Open office Calc, or even Lotus 123; all of these spreadsheets are used by millions of computer users around the world. Unfortunately, they are also being used for storing passwords; but, why is it unfortunate? The reason is that there are several freely available programs that can be used for cracking .xls files; that's why using this spreadsheets isn't a good idea.

Password protect folders may be the solution for some of your needs. However, there is nothing more secure than having a computer with an access password. And, in the case that multiple people use it, you can have several users, each one with its own password and limited access. Finally, remember that the best way to manage passwords is by maintaining them secret.

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