Which is worse, a faintly guessable password or one that's so complicated you have to write it down?

abennett13 weeks ago

I was reading a post on Bruce Schneier's security blog about 1234 and birthdays being the most common banking PINs and a commenter replied that "It's far better to have slightly more guessable PIN than it is to encourage people to write the bloody things down." What do you think?

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jimlynch 13 weeks ago

Well, I suppose it depends on the likelihood of anybody finding it if you wrote it down. If there's nothing on the password that identifies what it's used for then it might not be of much use to anybody.

Of course you can always use an entire sentence, with numbers and special characters. It might be easier to remember but still hard for somebody to figure out. Spice it up by doing it in a foreign language and that could help too. And use capital letters within the password.

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pint2stone 13 weeks ago

In my experiance as a network admin, I find that neither is the best solution.

The main tip I give for any numbers in a password is to create a symbol on the numeric pad. fairly easy to remember and gives out a rather random number sequence. The same thing can be done with any part of the keyboard

For example,

M --> 1475963

P --> 1478965

X --> 753951 (or however yo prefer to write the cross !!)

Ok not totaly foolproof and undetectable but I've had less "pasword reset" demands since i gave out this tip and nobody writes it down.

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