Change Your Password Day

February 1 is National Change Your Password Day. In celebration of this wonderful day, I thought we should all change our passwords to be 35 characters long. Just kidding. But on a serious note, it is a proven fact that password length is the best way to ensure your password is not compromised. How can you come up with long passwords? Use a phrase or sentence. There are good ways to do this and there are ways that make it easier for bad guys to guess or crack your password.

1. Don't use socially engineerable things. Information that people can learn about you through social media or just by knowing you. This includes things like kids' names, pets' names, dates of importance, year you were born, etc.
2. Don't start your password with your capital letter. Many, if not most, people when told they need to use all the complexity rules for passwords (uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and special characters) will start their password with a capital letter.
3. Don't put your number or in most cases two number right at the end of your capitalized word. i.e. Winter23. These digits will generally be the year a person is born, graduates, gets married, or has kids.
4. Finally, don't end your password with an "!" This is the most common last character in any password.

Instead, come up with you own unique password algorithm. Rather than starting your password with a capital letter, make the last letter of your second word the capital letter. Instead of numbers representing a year, change a vowel o with 0, or i with 1. At the end, don't use an "!", instead end it with a different character or maybe start your passwords with a special character. Bad Passwords Winter23! Jamaica19! Good Passwords !reallyHatebeingcoldinthewint3r mIssions1njamaicamakesmeh@ppy Written by  Christopher Tangen Executive Vice President/Chief Technology Officer Mid Minnesota Federal Credit Union