What is a "Secure Password"?

Passwords have been around forever. You use them to log into everything you access online.

Is your password secure?

We used to be able to create a 3-5 character passwords without any complexity and this password was good. Nowadays with everyone having an online presence creating a secure password will ensure your accounts aren't compromised. So what is a "Secure Password" exactly.

A secure password is between 8 - 16 characters long and includes upper case letters, lowercase letters, a number, and a special character. You start to think though, "How am I ever going to remember this!?!"

Well there are several solutions but right now we will talk about mnemonics (neh-mon-nics). Mnemonics is defined as, "the study and development of systems for improving and assisting the memory." You might remember this from school. For example, in IT, there are the 7 layers of the OSI model:

Application
Presentation
Session
Transport
Network
Data Link
Physical

We used the first character of each word to to write out a simple sentence that was easier to remember.
"All People Seem To Need Data Processing"

The same can be applied to passwords. Do you read poetry? Do you have a favorite book or phrase that stands out to you? You can use this to create a secure password. Let's try it out.

I enjoy poetry so I will base my example off of that. One of my favorite poems is The Tyger by William Blake.
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger)

We will use just one of his stanzas to create our password:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

With this we can use the first or even second character in every word to create a password:

ttbbitfotn (first character in each word)
yyurnhofhi (second character)

This doesn't seem very secure though so we have to salt it up a bit using our secure password rules, so we can for example do:

TtbBitfoTn
uppercase and lowercase but still not secure enough, lets pepper it some more:

1TtbB2itfoTn!
13 characters long, uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers and a special character.

With the above password I only used the first 2 lines of the stanza and already created an easy to remember password. If I ever forget the password I know it was based off the poem so by reading the poem it will help me to remember this password.

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