I tried that at work one day when I was getting pissed off with the ridiculous password requirements for one of the dozen systems I have to use every day.
I got a message back saying that profanities in passwords are not acceptable. So it became “PhuckYou”
Join the club! I do security consulting and often on an engagement we end up cracking the password hashes - you’d be surprised how many passwords are some variety of that.
The “I Hate My Job” related passwords are always amusing too…
I guess people don’t always realize that passwords aren’t as private as they think. We generally crack the majority of the client’s windows environment (usually between 500-3000 users) in a day tops using simple open source software.
I think I’ll just sit quietly over here and not say anything…
Aw, great. Now I have to go change my SDMB password, and my luggage combination.
I learned this from somebody else here:
ZAQ!zse4
XSW@xdr5
CDE#cft6
and so on. No need to memorize the characters, just the pattern. You could generate a 12 character password if 8 isn’t enough:
ZSE$rfvGY&
XDR%tgbHU*
and so on.
How about 14=Ko/GinaFPD?
(runs away…)
You think that i hard? My own password is 15 characters long, including capital, lowercase, numbers and symbols!
A lot of my passwords (I frequent a lot of message boards) are an a certain number of space bar spaces. No letters, no numbers, nothing but a number of blank spaces (the amount known only to me). It works surprisingly a lot of the time and those that it doesn’t, I combine letters with spaces (example: a f a a ) and that always seems to work, but again, mostly just on message boards, I’ve found. That includes on this message board.
I had a friend who worked in the ultimate high security job - she published dictionaries.
Passwords has to be the usual 2 upper case, 2 lower case and two %$. And they had to be changed every week. Everyone just wrote their super secret code down on a sticky note and stuck it on their monitor.
I generally use a variant spelling of an obsolete or specialized English word, and l33tify that; almost the same as you do.
For numeric passwords like voice mail, I use old street addresses, or sometimes the mailbox number we had while I was growing up. Spelling out words on the keypad works too.
Luckily I haven’t had to deal with any really insane password requirements.
And this is exactly why I never required my lusers to have super complicated passwords. IMHO, security goes down as complexity goes up (past a certain point)
I have 3 different passwords at work. There is one application that I refer to multiple times every hour. Typical password protocol 1 upper case, 1 lower case, 1 special character…
But the brains in IT have it set to lock out after 5 minutes of inactivity.
I shit you not - I have to log into this thing 20 times a day.
And then the application, in its own buggy way, sometimes decides that I’m still logged in from the previous session and it gets cranky. I can’t log in while I’m already logged in. I then have to phone IT to get them to log me out or I have to wait for about an hour for it to decide that I must have forgotten to log out and it eventually disconnects my session.
I want to say a bad word now.
So I have a great password. It’s got a special character and isn’t in the dictionary, yet is easy to type.
No good. My bank won’t accept anything shorter than 6 characters.
Another account won’t accept any non-alpha characters.
Another has a maximum of 8 chars, so my new 10-char realgood PW won’t work.
Another won’t accept numeric chars, so the number I substituted for the special char won’t work, either.
You can’t win.