How do I choose a good password?

By Leo Notenboom

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve once again heard of a couple of major websites suffering from data breaches that have exposed information about millions of user passwords to hackers.

This theft brings up again the concept of so-called “good passwords.”

What many people don’t realize is that the thinking around exactly what it means to have a good password is changing.

And it may be changing in ways you wouldn’t expect.

To understand what makes a good password, we need to understand just a little about what makes passwords vulnerable – which means understanding a couple of the different ways that hackers hack.

Along the way, I’ll also discuss hashes (again) and why a “salted hash” isn’t breakfast food, but rather a critically important approach websites should be using to keep track of your passwords.

And there will be rainbows.

The Rules: Old and New

For those with short attention spans,I’ll start with what you need to do differently–Article Continued Here, beginning yesterday.

This post is excerpted with permission from Leo Notenboom.

About Leo Notenboom

Leo A. Notenboom is the owner of Puget Sound Software, LLC and the Leo in Ask Leo!. Leo has been in the personal computer and software industry since 1979, as a software engineer, a manager of software engineers, and as a consultant. In 1983 Leo joined what was then a medium sized local company called Microsoft and spent the next 18 years in a wide variety of groups working on a wide variety of software. If you're running Microsoft Windows, if you've used a Microsoft development tool or Microsoft Money, or if you've ever purchased a ticket through Expedia, there's a good chance you've been touched by some of his work. And of course, since 2003, Leo has been answering your tech questions on Ask Leo!

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