The Problem

Lately I’ve been a bit concerned about digital security because of several websites that were hacked and some friends that had their email accounts compromised. I’ve been using 1Password for a long time, so I have incredibly long and complex passwords for almost all of my online accounts. However, there are still a few passwords that have to be memorable for times when I might not have access to my 1Password database. These are my MacBook firmware/user account, Dropbox account and 1Password database. Up until now, I’ve had one fairly weak password, with slight modifications, for each of these, and it made me worry.

The Solution

That changed today when I read this post (via TBR) that pointed out an interesting method for creating memorable passwords. In this article, Thomas shows that using a simple three-word password like “this is fun” is actually more secure (and much more memorable) than something like “J4fS<2”. He says that it would take more than 2,500 years to break this password using a common-word dictionary, but actually there’s no reason that the hacker would know your password is three words rather than 11 characters, so it would take even longer. This realization just made my day, because now I can have easily-remembered passwords that are secure!

It’s easy to be lax about our digital security, but it’s also easy to become paranoid. Avoid both of these problems by buying a copy of 1Password¹ and creating a handful of multi-word passphrases for accounts you need to remember. Now I can stop worrying about security and focus more on backups…

1. But make sure you go back and change all your old passwords!↩