I signed up for the new government service this week - do these people not read the things they write?
Your password must be between 9 and 16 characters long and contain a mixture of upper and lower case letters, numbers and a special character (!,@,#,$,%,^,&,*).
For maximum security your Password should not:
Have two repeating characters
Include the user name as part of the Password
Use dictionary/common words
Use words/common phrases with substituted numbers for characters e.g. he110 for hello.
But above all make it easy to remember and keep it in a safe place. It must be changed every 90 days.
Have you considered, instead of memorizing a string of characters for your password, using a
pattern of keys on the board? Like: draw two doughnuts and hold the shift button for one of them? For example: press '345tgfde', then hold shift and press '567ujhgt'.
The password will come out as:
345tgfde%^&UJHGT
It'll meet all the requirements and it's actually really easy to input.
Also you don't ever have to remember what the password actually is, you just have to remember how to make it.
Too, if you're writing it down then it'll still be encoded: "doughnuts 3 and 5, lower - upper"
You can also do things like: "987, lower upper lower"
For that you can just start at 9 and move down the board, then do 8 and then do 7, hold shift for the middle one:
9ijn*UHB7ygv
If you're good enough you can just do three "swipes" down the board and get all the keys pressed. Super simple yet still secure.
™ Version 4.2
(1)
