Tom Proell Has a Password for You

By John | Published: February 21, 2009

Stay Out! How to Keep Hackers from Breaking your Password

My buddy, Tom Proell from Prialto sent me a system for creating passwords that they recommend to their clients.

Easy-to-guess passwords can be devastating, as personal information can be stolen, used, and abused. As a proactive measure, we at Prialto provided our members with tips on how to create strong and secure passwords to help keep their personal information safe. Here it is for the benefit of Harper-Mees readers:

To start, don’t use actual words that can be found in any dictionary. Don’t use the names of family members or pets.

Instead, construct a sentence that you can easily remember. For example, if you’re a big soccer fan, you can probably remember something like this:

Soccer is fun to watch and a great exercise for me!

or

David Beckham is a soccer star and my favorite player.

The next step is to take such sentences and use the first letter of each word to create an acronym. In the process, look for words that can be substituted with numbers or symbols: “to” may be substituted with “2”; “for” may be substituted with “4”; “star” may be substituted with an asterisk (*); “and” may be substituted with an ampersand (&).

Now, let’s create our passwords.

“Soccer is fun to watch and a great exercise for me!” becomes: Sif2w&age4m!

“David Beckham is a soccer star and my favorite player.” becomes: DBias*&mfp.

No one is going to guess these passwords. Passwords like these appear to be completely random, and are, therefore, meaningless to other people. Plus, their lengths can be adjusted to satisfy character requirements for individual accounts.

Even with unique passwords, however, it is still wise to avoid using the same password for everything. Create different passwords for different accounts. For those accounts that don’t have sensitive information, you can use simpler passwords – just don’t make them too simple!Have fun creating new, strong, and secure passwords!