Password Advice: How to Pick a Good Password

There are many sources of password advice. This is a short summary that should help you pick a good password.

Hackers are constantly attacking web servers and other network resources in the attempt to "own" them so they can be used for sending spam, carrying out distributed denial of service attacks, or doing other bad things. Most days we are probed hundreds of times by hackers looking to break in. We do not want to become a victim.

To stay one step ahead of the hackers, we run our own password hacking program to test all passwords for ease of break-in. If we break your password, we assume a hacker could too. So we warn you to secure your account better, and if you don't fix it we suspend your account to protect ourselves.

The cracked list at the top of this page is a partial list of actual student passwords that were cracked by our password hacking program. Those would be examples of bad passwords.

Here are some rules for picking a good password:

• The key thing is that your password should be (a) easy for YOU to remember, (b) hard for someone who sees it to remember, and (c) hard for anyone to guess.

• Especially avoid dictionary words. These are the first things that hackers try.

• I recommend that you use the initial lettes of a phrase you can remember. For example, "I Nephi, having been born of goodly parents" might become "INhbbogp".

• Modify your password by replacing some letters with digits or other special characters. For example, "INhbbogp" might become "1Nhb20gp" where we replace the "I" with a digit "1", the two "b"s with a "b2", and the letter "o" with a digit "0".

• Here are some popular character swaps to get you thinking:     A = 4 = @     B = % = 8 = 6     E = 3     G = 6     I = 1(one) = l(el) = !     K = 1< = x     O(oh) = 0(zero)     q = 9     er = 0r     S = $ = 5     T = 7 = +

• Change your password if you think it has been discovered.