Jottings from a good article in the Melbourne Age’s Green Guide by Charles Wright (Sept 29, 2011):

* One commonly available ‘password guesser’ can recover 24% of all passwords by using just 100,000 combinations: it can test several hundred thousand passwords in a second

* The free open-source Password Safe site (bit.ly/1tqNES) helps you keep track of passwords. Typical password from that site: HSJatS1JH{m]. Steve Gibson’s password security calculator at bit.ly/jTDNCh: reckons that in a typical online attack scenario that password would take 1.74 hundred billion centuries to crack!

* One way to devise a memorable password (memorable only for you): ‘I was born in Melbourne on’ would give you IwbiMo. If you were born on September 27 your password would become IwbiM00927. Add a full-stop and an exclamation-mark and you’ve got    IwbiM00927.! a relatively impenetrable password which is easily memorable (for you). According to the password security calculator it would take an online attacker 1.74 hundred billion centuries to crack it.

* Even a massive cracking array generating one hundred Trillion guesses per second would take 1.74 centuries to penetrate your defences.  (My question: what if someone else knew your day/month of birth and factored that four digit number into the search?).

* If you forget your passwords you can store them all in Password Safe or possibly the more convenient commercial RoboForm Everywhere (about $10 a year) at roboform.com .