The recent leak of over 16 000 000 000 passwords is quite serious and was reported when the world was hardly looking. At the time of this writing it was scrubbed from the major US news outlets.
There’s all sorts of good advice for creating strong passwords. Even if one uses a password manager, the password to access that manager must be memorable and strong. I offer the following mechanism for creating such a password:
- Use a memorable phrase not in common use that includes at least one Arabic numeral. For an overly long example, “Al Gore would have won in 2000 if he won his home state of Tennessee”.
- The base of password is created by taking the first letter in the phrase, retaining case and all numerals. The above phrase becomes “AGwhwi2000ihwhhsoT”.
- Append a special symbol such as ! @ # % ~
- One final resulting password in this example would be AGwhwi2000ihwhhsoT!
