Friday, June 5, 2020

Four Steps to Create a Strong and Easy to Remember Password

Kaspersky Lab experts have released an agile guide to create different passwords for each service. The four key steps:

February 1st was the "Change Your Password Day 2019". And for the occasion, Kaspersky Lab's experts released an agile guide to create different passwords for each service, effective but easy to remember. "There is a lot of confusion as to what we mean when we talk about 'strong' passwords," explains David Jacoby, a Kaspersky Lab researcher. "Many websites now require the inclusion of complex sequences, consisting of at least eight or more lowercase or uppercase letters, numbers and even special characters. Users have come to regard this type of combination as a 'strong password', which is quite daunting. " In reality, Jacoby continues "the generally 'strong' passwords are the only ones, for a user and for an account". But how do you create them? And how can we remember them?


A password in four steps

First step: create a part of password that always remains the same. Provided it is not easily readable. NomeCognome is certainly not bomb proof, even if enriched with other characters. To create a strong base, Kaspersky suggests three steps.

First: "Think of a sentence, the lyrics of a song, the quotations of a film, a nursery rhyme or something similar, that is easy to remember".

Second: "Take the first letter of the first three or first five words."

Third: "Add, between one letter and another, a special character (for example: #, @, / and the like)". Now, you can base all your unique passwords on this single character string.

Be careful though, building a single password, however "strong", is not enough. "The biggest danger - underlines the cybersecurity company - is related to reuse". Because stealing a single key would open all your doors. Here is how to differentiate passwords without asking too much of our memory.

Fourth: Take the basic string and "write down the first word that is associated with the site or platform" to access. “If you are creating a password for your Facebook account - suggests Kaspersky - you could associate the social color with the blue color, present in the logo. It would be enough, therefore, to add the word 'blue' ”. But it is always a word based on a subjective association of ideas (and this is precisely its strength).