Now that I changed it, and since several people have asked, I can tell you that my old password was:
The sky is blue, and all the trees are green. (It’s lyrics to a hilarious song from Cannibal: The Musical, by the guys who created South Park.)
It’s a bit excessive, but I wanted to use it as an example of a Windows password that was not going to get hacked. With Windows, the best passwords are phrases – song lyrics, movie quotes, bible verses, etc. The reason these work the best is that it is easy to make a long password that you can always remember.
Researchers are discovering that while truly random passwords are great, it is the password length that gives it security. Most researchers agree that the BARE MINIMUM you should be using on all of your important accounts is 10 characters.
I know that seems long, but the FBI raided a facility in California where crackers had linked together 26 Playstation3 systems that together were able to brute force attack a password at a rate of 600,000 combinations per second. The previous speed anyone was aware of was 250,000 per second. That means that 8 character passwords we thought were good for 9-10 months are now only good for 4 months.
So again, the length of your password is the important part. !*****dog*****! is actually a stronger password than 4rTn76^r32 is, just because of the length. (But please don’t use that as your password now that I put it in print!) So stick with phrases and lyrics that you will remember. And if other systems won’t let you use spaces (some banks and credit card companies won’t), just smoosh all the words together but make sure you keep some numbers and punctuation in there.
HaveAGreat2012Day!
Jamie
