SecureSlash

The fewer types of characters in your password, the longer it must be. A 15-character password composed only of random letters and numbers is about 33,000 times stronger than an 8-character password composed of characters from the entire keyboard. If you cannot create a password that contains symbols, you need to make it considerably longer to get the same degree of protection. An ideal password combines both length and different types of symbols.

Use the entire keyboard, not just the most common characters. Symbols typed by holding down the “Shift” key and typing a number are very common in passwords. Your password will be much stronger if you choose from all the symbols on the keyboard, including punctuation marks not on the upper row of the keyboard, and any symbols unique to your language.

Think of a sentence that you can remember. This will be the basis of your strong password or pass phrase. Use a memorable sentence, such as “My son Aiden is three years old.”

Finally, substitute some special characters. You can use symbols that look like letters, combine words (remove spaces) and other ways to make the password more complex. Using these tricks, we create a pass phrase of “MySoN 8N i$ 3 yeeR$ old” or a password (using the first letter of each word) “M$8ni3y0″.Noskian algorithm

Take a word that describes your favorite food or hobby and intersperse numbers and special characters.

For example, start with apple, add a special character, capitalize at least one letter, and add your two lucky numbers to make:

Ap&pl48E
Or start with tennis and turn it into te10N*ns
Suppose your street address is 2572 some street, USA. Take the reciprocal i.e. 1/x of the numeric address. 1/2572 = 3.8880248833592534992223950233281e-4. Drop the decimal and take as many digits as the system will allow for your password. Like the first eight digits - 38880248. All you have to remember is your street address and 1/X. Now even you don’t know your password until you need it! When you are ready to change your password just use the reciprocal with say, your grandma’s phone number.

how about X^2/squareroot(x) where x is a number you can remember like grandma’s phone number. Again drop decimals if need be.

There are 4 basic ways to break a password.

· Any password can be broken given enough time and computer cycles. This is called a brute force attack. Generally the longer the password the longer it takes to break it!

· Dictionary attacks- The hacker just tries all or many of the words in the dictionary usually starting with the short common ones like “cat”, “dog” etc.

· Personal attacks – A hacker doesn’t have to know you personally to use this kind of attack. Just your phone number, name, address etc.

· Insider attacks – someone at work sees your password written on a piece of paper, sees you type it in, or heaven forbid you give it to someone. No one can protect you against the last one but you.

Lets try some passwords:
aty;nva {Just type it.. Your key press sequence will make a small diamond symbol}

GrandMotherBoard {just for fun}
F1toF12
EscfromWindows
Enterin2Linux
5*Hotel

Ref:
http://its.syr.edu/accounts/psswdsug.cfm
http://itim.tamu.edu/good_passwords.shtml
http://www.itc.virginia.edu/accounts/passwords.html
http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/privacy/password.mspx