One of the biggest problems with security today is people still choose terrible passwords. Using your dog or kids name as your password is not secure. In today's social networking world (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter), names of family members or other personal information like where you were born, your birthday, anniversaries, etc are not good choices. The list of what not to use is enormous but here are some key points. Any word in the dictionary is bad even compound words with numbers or symbols.

Here is how to create a strong password that you can remember and will not easily be cracked. Create a phrase to remember, "I walk to the bus every morning". That's pretty easy to remember right. All I have to do is remember "I walk to the bus every morning". Here is how to turn that into a password. Simply take the first or last letter of each word in the phrase. Using the first letter my password would be "Iwttbem", or using the last letter it is "Iktesyg". Look at those passwords. Who is going to guess one of those? They contain nothing a brute force dictionary attack would have.

Want to step it up even more? How about this, I hate to pound nails into concrete . Transform that into "Ih2#nic" instead of using the "t" from "to" we replaced it with the number 2 and we added a # (pound symbol) where the word pound was. You can use all kinds of symbol word replacement, using these words in your past phrase. Add dollar, percent, carrot, and star, dash and minus just to name a few. I will give you one more example with the above technique and the symbols above. I paid a dollar at the store for carrots , could be "Ipa$@tsf^". That's one of the strongest passwords I have seen in a long time.

Wrapping up, I have shown you a really easy technique for creating and remembering strong passwords. Yes that means you have to change your passwords but a lot is riding on the strength of your passwords. How many bank websites do you use that are using weak passwords as described in the first paragraph?