Build a password out of four ordinary words
Make passwords far stronger than anything you have used before, and considerably less annoying to type.
Nearly everything we were taught about passwords around 2006 turned out to be wrong. Capitals, numbers and a punctuation mark gave us passwords hard to remember and no great trouble for machines.
Guessing is done by machine, billions of attempts a second. Every extra character multiplies the work. Swapping an e for a 3 adds almost nothing — every program knows that trick. A whole extra word adds an enormous amount.
Key points
- Length beats cleverness — three or four ordinary words beat symbols every time
- A website’s strength meter measures its own rules, not your safety
- Reusing one password is what actually catches people, however strong it is
- Your email password matters more than your bank password
What to remember
- A website’s strength meter measures whether you followed its rules. That is not the same thing as being safe.
- The figure in that meter is the number of guesses required. Length is the thing that moves it.
- Wherever you used it again, they are in. Nothing was guessed — the password was correct.
Try this
Change one password this evening: your email. Four words you can picture, with hyphens between them.
Practice: Build a password out of four ordinary words. Your first lesson is free, with no account or card; the rest are part of a Lantern plan. Interactive lessons require JavaScript.