This is an old revision of the document!
By Joran Martijn (22nd June 2021)
Passwords and Passphrases are, despite our best intentions, often poorly chosen. The dilemma is to use a seemingly super secure but hard to remember password, or a highly insecure but easy to remember password. Below I outline some tips and tricks on how to choose secure yet fairly easy to remember passwords
RULE #1
NEVER EVER use password, guest, letmein, qwerty, admin, 123456 or variations of these. You don't have to be a true hacker to crack these passwords.
RULE #2
Do NOT use a password that is short (i.e., less than 8 characters long). Short passwords can be fairly easily bruteforced (trying 'aaaa', 'aaab', 'aaac' etc all the way until 'zzzz')
RULE #3
Do NOT use common English words or try to replace A's with 4's, E's with 3's etc etc. Such passwords can be easily cracked via so-called dictionary attacks. A hacker will essentially try a large list of commonly used words and their variations to crack your password. The less common your words are, the better.
RULE #4
NEVER use the same password more than once! We all (myself included) fall into the trap of re-using the same passwords because there are so many passwords to keep track of nowadays and the easiest way to deal with that is to keep using the same passwords. I highly recommend identifying your most important accounts and choose unique passwords for each of them.