Ultimate Security Child's Play

A fellow DA member had trouble with her email being hacked... that is, someone figured out
her password.

Hackers often use programs that specifically run through reasonable combinations of
letters and numbers and simply keep trying until they succeed; they have the time and who
knows how much computing power that they have available to them.

The trick to out-smarting such hackers is to make the password more complicated...
Unfortunately, that means making it more complicated on you.

This article outlines a new and easy-to-implement method that will allow anyone to create
easy-to-remember but nearly-impossible-to-hack passwords.  You are able to create
12-character passwords without any trouble and use special characters exactly
like child's play.

With every additional character that you add to your password, you increase the
difficulty of hacking it by a factor of 52.  If you use special characters, that
factor becomes 90.  If you were able to add four special characters to even a simple
four-character password,  it becomes 65,000,000 times difficult to guess.

To create a password that approaches the realm of impossibility to hack, you would need
to get creative as I have.  My own passwords are based on patterns of movement
on the key board instead of remembering the characters themselves.
 You are then not restrained to using letters and numbers.

For instance, my email password includes at the end the following sequence

_{:>/']=_{:>

While that does look impossible to remember, if you look at your keyboard, you will see
that I hold down the Shift key while I go from top to bottom on the second-to-last
character available in each row; then I release Shift and go back up on last
character in each row to the top; I finish by repeating the Shift key on while going down
the original row on which I began.*

If you try that sequence yourself, you will see that it is extremely easy to remember
as a pattern.

However, twelve special characters in a row will likely blow any password-hacking
program right out of the water.

It will be a very long time until my method of using patterns will become widespread
enough to become a method considered by hackers.

The only difficulty that I encounter in implementing this pattern method is either when
the password cannot contain special characters or the length of the password
is restricted.

In cases such as that, I need to use alternate versions of the pattern method; such as
restricting my pattern to the numbers and letters, but still retaining the use
of Shifting to use capital letters.

The pattern method can be used by itself and still be completely effective but I do
recommend a minimum of twelve characters.  Twelve may sound like a lot but as
you can see in the example above, twelve special characters can be implemented with
very little work.

As I am a sort of mad scientist, I combine an ordinary password of letters and numbers
with my pattern method to create a routinely-used 18-character password that
happens to differ but a little bit for nearly every password that I must
create, according to the site that I am accessing.  

I used to use the same 8-digit password for everything but had trouble once or
twice.  Since I have implemented these strategies, I have operated in peace
on the Internet for nearly a decade.

My email does get a special 25-character password as I consider email most vulnerable and
important.

But my ultimate password is reserved for encrypting Microsoft Office documents:
33-character password with 24 special characters in a row.  Difficulty of hacking:
number of possibilities is 90000000000000000000000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000000
0000000000000000000000000
0000000000000 (nine followed by 138 zeroes).

But as previously stated, using only 12 special characters increases the number of
possible passwords for you by 65,000,000.  And for every additional special
character that you use, multiply the previous possibilities by 90.

Implement a pattern-method password now.  It is child's play.


* These characters are not the exact ones that I use.  I have modified the example for purposes of my own security.