Creating a safe password

Often, people make the mistake to choose a guessable password. The worst mistake you can make is to use your username (in the case of Neopets and so forth) or your site's name. Choosing your own name, your middle name, your sibling's or parents' names is also not a good choice. You might mention any of these and they are usually first on the list of someone trying to guess. Regular nouns like "pizza" are common passwords, same goes for verbs such as "run". Nicknames and pet's names are also a no no.

Instead, try to make a complexer password including at least one number and both upper and lower case letters. Your password should be a series of digits, at least 6 if possible. Idealy, your password has no "real" words in it at all. For example, "p!ZzA" is safer than "pizza", but "p24i53A334z23Z" is even safer. Mix your upper and lower cases. Instead of making just the first word uppercased, randomly make your passwords lower and upper case. Deliberatly missspelling words (go for "piza" instead of "pizza") can really make your password a lot harder to guess.

Now we are going to attempt to create a simple password that, best of all, you can remember. Look around you. See anything odd that usually isn't there? In my case that would be a box of Kokett tissues that usually aren't around. My first word will be "kokett". Now find another term completely unrelated. Instead of looking around were you are, however, try to remember back to something you did lately that you don't do a lot. An example would be going to the circus, being dragged off to go site-seeing in a weird city you don't like or memorizing a poem by heart for english class. Now you can pick out a name from any of those things. The name of the circus, the city or the poem. This will be your second word. In my case its "dult" which is a local folkfestivial that I was at yesterday. So now you have two totally unrelated, random words. You can either just cominde them "kokettdult" or play with adding numbers and so forth to making it even harder to guess. Such as "koKe1tdu2Lt" or whatever.

The key to creating a safe password is making it as random and hard to guess as possible. By using totally random words that have nothing to do with another, you are ensuring that your password is extremely hard to guess. However, you can never be careful enough. Never tell anyone your password and always make sure that if you do, you are positive you can trust that person. If you own a website, I strongly advise against giving your password to your staff, it can proove to be very dangerous as they might even delete your entire site. Instead, only one or two people should know the password. Other staff can e-mail you their artwork or writing.