Customers now have the option to make their passwords stronger, and will be forced to choose a password at least 8 characters in length when signing up or changing their current password. More details can be found in this article on strong passwords.
The most common support problem for people who do change passwords is remembering how to change the password for their ADSL router. To help, we’ve produced a guide for common routers with details of what you need to do. If you have a router we’ve not included on this page, you can leave feedback on the article and we will try and add it later.
Customers who currently have a weak password may in the future be forced to change them, but at this stage we would simply ask customers to have a think about their password and make sure it is as secure as possible.
This entry was posted by Ian Wild on Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 1:40 pm and is tagged with and is posted in the category Newsletter Content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a reply below. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Ian
I know that a lot of users find it difficult to create a password which is both strong (more than 8 characters including both upper and lower case letters and numerics) and also memorable.
I read about this method on one of the security websites and it might be worth publishing it on the help pages when users are asked to select an initial password.
Think of an easily remembered phrase with a minimum of 8 words or numerics (preferably more than 10) which is relevant to you, e.g.
Number 1 "Ian Wild has worked at Plus Net since 2003", or No2 "Ian and Jean moved to Sheffield in 2005".
Now take the initial letter of each word and the digit as applicable:
so No 1 becomes "IWhwaPNs2003" I could then randomise it further by putting the 20 (or the 03) at the beginning:
20IWhwaPNs03 seemingly a totally random mix of Upper and lower case letters and digits of more than 8 characters.
No 2 becomes "IaJmtSi2005" or 20IaJmtSi05
Users can think of any number of ways of creating these e.g.
"Ian Wild's daughters are Anne age 4 and Dorothy aged 7" becomes IWdaAa4aDa7
"My first car was a Triumph Acclaim in 1993" becomes 19MfcwaTAi93
To make it even stronger you can add punctuation like the full stop or exclamation mark.
Hope this is useful.
Excellent post.
And I thought "Pa55word" was clever 
One of the things I've been recommended before is 'wrapping'. That is taking the name of the site you are on and splitting it around your 'usual' password to create a unique password for every site you go to.
Example:
Lets say my normal password was Pa55w0rd
When I got to Hotmail I would use HotPa55w0rdMail
Ebay would be EPa55w0rdBay
And so on...
A neat idea, but the downside is once one password is cracked the others are easy to guess.
Here at Plusnet we're always trying to use clever open source things to make our lives easier. Sometimes we write our own and make other people's lives easier too!
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