Selecting Strong Passwords
Most of us will agree that passwords are extremely important to everyone of us because any unauthorized mis-use can cause considerable damage to our assets.
Choosing a password is not simply a choice of words which you choose not to disclose to anyone. Simple words like "happy", "iloveyou" are not considered strong password since hackers are smart enough to make intelligent guess on the common wordings that people like to use for their passwords!
Our recent campus-wide administrative password audit showed a substantial percentage of Windows desktops have guessable administrative passwords. Worms/Hackers can easily guess such passwords to infect/attack your desktops. It is therefore important that you choose strong administrative passwords.
One simple way to choose strong passwords that are easy to remember is to think of a sentence/phrase and use the first character of each word or syllable in the sentence. For instance, a phrase could be "I love to read security alerts.". Extracting each syllable I, l, t, r, s, c, r, t, a, l and using numeric sound-alikes i.e. using 2 for to and retaining punctuation, the password ends up to be Il2rscrtal. .
To check your password against our compiled list of 200K common passwords used by worms/hackers, please access https://selftest1.nus.edu.sg:9876/chkpass.html
If you are on the correct track, it is not too difficult to get a ust need to trigger a bit of your creativity. This page is dedicated to provide the readers with more insight to how to choose a strong password.
Other useful links for choosing passwords:
