How To Make Hard-To-Guess Passwords

Larry Magid: One of Best Ways to Protect Online Security is With Strong Passwords that are Frequently Changed

(CBS) One of the best ways to protect your online security is to have strong passwords that you change periodically. But that's easier said than done. Coming up with hard-to-guess passwords is hard enough, but it's even harder to have separate passwords for different sites and to remember new ones after you change them.

One way to create a password that's hard to guess but easy to remember is to make up a phrase. You could type in the entire phrase (some sites let you use spaces, others don't) or you can use the initials of each word in the phrase, for instance, "IgfLESi85" for "I graduated from Lincoln Elementary School in '85." An even better one would be "MbfihswE&S" for "My best friends in high school were Eric and Steve." You get the idea--upper case numbers, letters, and symbols that are seemingly meaningless to everyone but you. Microsoft has an excellent primer on passwords and a password strength checker.

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