Our thinking

To have strong, different passwords for each of your important accounts is a must these days. It is not good enough to have a very good password repeated everywhere. It’s a potential for disaster. If you get hacked once, all your accounts could be affected, your identity supplanted, your bank account cleaned, your online persona stolen.

We all know the theory. Passwords should contain special characters, upper and lower case, they must be long and they must not include any common words (such as “password”). Any details personal to you are also a no go; dates, your pets name your place of birth. So it would seem that pretty much anything that makes sense to you  and can be found in a dictionary is bad for a password. Passwords must not be user friendly.

In Practice creating and remembering so many random sequences of characters is becoming a more and more impossible task.

What is your strategy for remembering? How do you cope? Do you have your own algorithm? Do you use a password management system? Do you write them down in a hidden piece of paper? Or have you given up all together and use “password” as your go to password?

We are researching how people juggle the growing need for online security and actually remembering passwords. So please tell us your story,  we would love to hear from you.