Creating and Using a Strong Hotmail Password as Your Password
Simple and Default Password
Creating and using simple or default passwords is not recommended. These are very easy for other people to crack. Your valuable information, such as credit card numbers, online bank account numbers, your mother’s maiden name and other important information is at risk. People should create and use strong passwords that are easy to make but hard to crack. The default password in any device, such as a router or modem, should be changed to a strong password as well.
When you sign-up for any web service, such as a free web-based e-mail account from Google Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo! mail, the password you enter is checked for its strength. It’s important to see “very strong”, “best” or “strong” when checking for password strength.
How to Create a Simple but Strong Password
Do not use your name or surname, birth date, birth place or pet’s name as your password. Anyone who knows you well can easily guess your password. A simple password is easy to crack using password cracker programs, so you should avoid using easy to guess and easy to crack passwords.
To start creating a password that is simple to remember but strong enough to beat password crackers, try thinking of a phrase or sentence that only you will remember. Do not reveal the phrase to anyone you know.
Creating a simple password that is easy to remember using a phrase:
Example phrase: Trust no one, know yourself before knowing others and do not speak for others.
To create a simple password based on the above phrase, take the first letter of each word and you have TNOKYBKOADNSFO as password. This password is a simple but weak password.
Making your password a strong password:
Now that you have an easy to remember password from your phrase, you should start to make it a strong password by replacing the letters with other characters. One strong password from the above simple password is to remember it as TN1KYB4KO&DNS4O. What we did there is we replaced O which is “one” to number 1 character, replaced B for “before” to B4, also replace “for” with number 4 and replaced A of “and” to &. Now that you have a strong password, it is still not a 100% strong password according to Password Checker.
To make that the password is a 100% strong password, replace all letter O’s with the number 0. You’ll have now TN1KYB4K0&DNS40 which is a 100% strong password that you can use as hotmail password!
How to Check the Strength of Your Password
Signing-up for email service allows you to check the strength of your password. Gmail, Live or Hotmail and Yahoo provide a password checker during the sign-up process and when you try to change an existing password.
If you want to create and check the strength of your password before signing-up for any online services, use Password Meter and Microsoft Password Checker free online services.
Don’t forget to not to use the same password for all services. Always create a simple to remember but 100% strong password then use password management program such as KeePass, LastPass, Password Plus, or Roboform. Browsers include password management as well such as Wand in Opera, Password Manager in Firefox and Internet Explorer but it is recommended to create a master password so you don’t need to remember many phrases or passwords.
Image credits: Screenshot taken by the author
