2014-10-19

100 great and easy "secure" passwords

Resetting my AppleID because I forgot the password, changing eBay and GMail passwords because of hacks, new rules for complex passwords and more of the same somehow left me with dozens of passwords and an irritating inability to merge and standardise the mess. One of the issues is the rules for "secure" passwords which sometimes include having an upper case letter, sometimes not etc.
Then I noticed (or was told, I don't recall!) how to easily generate a policy compliant password! Pick any two digits, say "01". Look at your keyboard and press the first digit 0 and then the keys to the right and down from it: P, ; and /. Now hold down the Shift key and do the same for the second digit. According The Password Meter the resultant password 0p;/!QAZ gets a 90% score and is "very strong". Do the same for your favourite two digits, e.g. a birthday.

There you have it – policy compliance and passwords that are easy to remember! Of course, I am not really suggesting using any of these as an actual password for anything serious but you could easily make your favourite password policy compliant by appending one these two-digit to eight-character password gargoyles.