Do I need to highlight their importance?

If criminals or other malicious users steal this information, they can use your name to open new credit card accounts, apply for a mortgage, or pose as you in online transactions. In many cases you would not notice these attacks until it is too late.

Why are strong passwords needed?

Passwords can be the weakest link in a computer security scheme. Strong passwords are important because password cracking tools continue to improve and the computers used to crack passwords are more powerful. Passwords that once took weeks to break can now be broken in hours or sometime minutes.

Password cracking software use one of three approaches:

Intelligent guessing, Dictionary attacks and automation that tries every possible combination of characters. Given enough time, the automated method can crack any, yes I mean ANY, password.

What makes a Strong Password:

The general rule for making a strong password is to make difficult to guess. It is true for human driven password breaking attempts as well as software attempts.

You can follow these useful tips for making strong passwords.

Combine letters, numbers, and symbols. The greater variety of characters that you have in your password, the harder it is to guess.

Use the entire keyboard, not just the most common characters. Passwords are stronger if you choose all the symbols, including punctuation marks.

Make it lengthy. Each character that you add to your password increases the protection that it provides many times over. Your passwords should be 8 or
more characters in length; 14 characters or longer is ideal.

Passphrase: Creating a strong, memorable password in 5 easy steps

1. Think of a sentence that you can remember. This will be the basis of your strong password or pass phrase. Use a memorable sentence, such as "The second letter of English Alphabet is B"

2. Take the first letter of each word of the sentence that you've created to create a new, nonsensical word. Using the example above, you'd get: "tsloeaib.

3. Add complexity by mixing uppercase and lowercase letters. It becomes "TsloEAiB"

4. Add some numbers. I add them after every two letters. You get "Ts2lo4EA6iB8". See the patterns, but they are hard to guess.

5. Finally, substitute some special characters. You can use symbols that look like letters or punctuation marks. "!Ts2lo4EA6iB8?"

See, it is now 14 characters in length.

Since it can be difficult to remember a ton of passwords, I recommend using Roboform. It will store all of your passwords in an encrypted format and allow you to use just one master password to access all of them.

It will also automatically fill in forms on Web pages, and you can even get versions that allow you to take your password list with you on your PDA, phone or a USB key.