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Your passwords are the keys you use to access personal information that you've stored on your computer and in your online accounts. Do I need to highlight the importance of creating and managing strong passwords? If criminals or other malicious users steal this information, they can use your name to open new credit card accounts, apply for a mortgage, or pose as you in online transactions. In many cases you would not notice these attacks until it is too late. Why are strong passwords needed? Passwords can be the weakest link in a computer security scheme. Strong passwords are important because password cracking tools continue to improve and the computers used to crack passwords are more powerful. With each passing days, new stronger and more intelligent password breaking tools and being developed, which work on different algorithms to break any password. Passwords that once took weeks to break can now be broken in hours or sometime even in minutes. Password cracking software use one of three approaches: Intelligent guessing, Dictionary attacks and automation that tries every possible combination of characters. Given enough time, the automated method can crack any, yes I mean ANY, password. Passphrase: Creating a strong, memorable password in 5 easy steps 1. Think of a sentence that you can remember. This will be the basis of your strong password or pass phrase. Use a memorable sentence, such as "The second letter of English Alphabet is B" 2. Take the first letter of each word of the sentence that you've created to create a new, nonsensical word. Using the example above, you'd get: "tsloeaib. 3. Add complexity by mixing uppercase and lowercase letters. It becomes "TsloEAiB" 4. Add some numbers. I add them after every two letters. You get "Ts2lo4EA6iB8". See the patterns, but they are hard to guess. 5. Finally, substitute some special characters. You can use symbols that look like letters or punctuation marks. "!Ts2lo4EA6iB8?" See, it is now 14 characters in length. Since it can be difficult to remember a ton of passwords, I recommend using Roboform. It will store all of your passwords in an encrypted format and allow you to use just one master password to access all of them. It is a small program, which you have to download from their website and then it works like charm. It will also automatically fill in forms on Web pages, and you can even get versions that allow you to take your password list with you on your PDA, phone or a USB key.
Article Source: http://www.domainean.com
The author of this article, Silki Garg, has written many high rated articles on Online Security and best tools to remove Spyware. You can download her book on 13 Steps to Total Online PC Security absolutely FREE.
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