Create a strong and secure XP password using password tools

Posted on May 8, 2007 at 9:50 pm

So you just joined a new company and you’re getting ready to logon to your computer and it’s then that you realize that at this company you can no longer use “abc” or your name as your password!!! Why?? Becuase it has to be SECURE, which means it has to have upper case, lower case, numbers and symbols and has to 9 characters long!! Good lord!! Just thinking up of a password that meets all those requirements can be a pain in the butt!

And then top if off, you have to change it ever 2 months and it can’t be any of the last 24 passwords you used previously!!! Crap!! And if you’re not good at remembering symbols and numbers in your password (like me), then you can use some handy password generator tools to help you in the process.

One way to do this is to have some kind of mapping or conversion system that you can use so that you only need to remember something very easy and when you need your password, simply “convert” it. This is called hashing in computer lingo, but all you are doing is taking a simple password like “ilovecats” and converting it to something else by using a set of rules, i.e. the letter “i” will be the number 4 in your password. That way, you convert your simple password into something that makes no sense and is considered secure (as long as no one gets their hands on your conversion scheme!).

That’s what Password Chart does for you. It’s pretty cool actually…you type in a phrase in the first text box, which will generate a “Password Chart“. This password chart is then used to convert the “simple” password that you type into the second box into something completely cryptic. Now either remember this password or simply remember your simple phrase and simple password and come to this site and type it in and it’ll give you the “hashed” version!

If you like, you can print out the chart and use it yourself offline. Now if you’re looking at this and saying to yourself “Well gee, that’s nice, but a pain in the ass to keep coming to this site to figure out my own password!”, then maybe you’ll like StrongPasswordGenerator.com instead.

What I like about this site is the fact that it gives you a little bit of a definition of a strong password (length, etc), you can pick the exact length that you want your password to be AND (and this is the best part), it tries to generate a mnemonic for you so that you can remember the password yourself and you don’t have to rely on coming back to the web site!

For my office, we need at least 8 characters with symbols included. This is what the web site gave me for a strong password:

And if you don’t like the one it suggests, just keep clicking to get more:

I found it interesting that wherever there was a “B”, it seems to put BRITNEY as the mnemonic of choice! I wonder why!! Enjoy your new super secure password.

Now that you have created your secure passwords, you may want to read my post on securely store your passwords locally or use an online password manager to remember your passwords.