Creating a Strong Password

An unreliable password can easily undermine all your subsequent efforts to protect your confidential data, which is why this chapter is placed at the beginning and is fundamentally the foundation of this book.

First of all, I suggest you take a test to find out how secure your current password is.

Using strong passwords is far from a simple issue, as it may seem at first glance. And although most users know the fundamental requirements for a strong password, they often forget about them in everyday life, preferring a simple and easily memorable password over a reliable one.

In the chapter about the mistakes of hackers that led to their arrest, I talked about how one of the FBI's most wanted hackers, Jeremy Hammond, was brought down by a simple password on an encrypted disk. The owner of Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, was doomed by the fact that FBI agents, upon obtaining his computer, found recorded passwords in plain text. In this section, we will teach you both how to create strong passwords and how to store them securely.

The first step I suggest is to categorize all passwords by their level of importance: high importance and regular importance.

What are high-importance passwords used for? For particularly important websites, cryptocontainers or programs. I use four high-importance passwords. The first, second, and third are passwords for decrypting the hard drive and the information on it, as well as for decrypting information on encrypted external hard drives (the third password is the password for the "double bottom"). The fourth is a password to access the other passwords in the KeePassXC password manager, which we will discuss in this section.

High-importance passwords should only be stored in your head and be as secure as possible. High-importance passwords should not be written down anywhere.

Do not be alarmed if some terms are not yet clear to you, if you are not currently encrypting your hard drives, do not understand what a "double bottom" of a cryptocontainer is, and do not have a password manager. As you work through this course, you will learn everything step by step and be able to securely protect your data.