Here's some thought on what you can do to make sure your passwords are strong. Avoid the following:
- using your user name
- using the same passoword with just a different digit
- using other easily guessable aspects to your password.
Instead, use a passphrase. A passphrase is a sentecy that you can early remember. The longer your passphrase, the stronger it is. Making your passphrase strong can limit the success of humans and/or computers in guessing your passphrase. Using only simple sentences is becoming less effective with the decreasing cost of consumer graphic cards, which allow approxminate 8,810,000 encrypted password hashes (how domain user's passwords are stored in Active Directory) to be attempted each second!
