Memorable Password Generator

Sound computer security practices has never been more important and usually boils down to one thing: good passwords. There are robots wandering the web constantly trying to log-in to anything they can find. Once the robot gets into an account, a human hacker is brought into the fray to see what can be exploited.

We, for example, are constantly having our servers challenged. The hacker robots go through a very predictable litany of passwords that are generally people names, pet names, or other common passwords such as the word “password” or “12345678” and so forth.

In some cases we have seen robots use a password from another system that exploits the fact that most people use the same password for all their accounts. So, for example, if a person has an email account “johnson@my-email.com” with a password of “rover” this person will likely use the same password when they sign up for an account at “my-jewelery.com”. The problem occurs when the database at my-jewelery.com is hacked.

The best way to protect your on-line accounts is to use a unique tough password for every account. That way the login information from my-jewelery.com will not let a hacker into the associated email account. The problem with tough passwords (like “Yui87%gh9!”) is that they are very hard to remember. And if you have a different password for every account then you’ll need a photographic memory.

And hence the Memorable Password Generator – a free web application which generates passwords using 2 randomly chosen words and a number. A password like “elephant19tree”, for example, can be remembered by using the human brain’s capacity to easily store images by visualizing the bizarre image of a tree with 19 elephants in it. Go ahead and focus on this scene in your mind’s eye for 10 seconds. Count the 19 elephants. Now – you will always remember this password, while the hacker robots will need at least 5,000 years to spin through the dictionary and come up with this one.

And feel free to step up the security of these passwords by adding another word, throwing in an upper case letter/punctuation mark, or making the number portion longer.