Passwords are a good thing, right? It’s pretty much a given. But to be useful they need to be memorable. Or they’ll be soon forgotten or worse still, written down – defeating the point entirely.
I recently had need to use the National Savings & Investments website to invest in some Premium Bonds. While the application form itself caused no problems, choosing a password was an entirely different affair.
I have three passwords that I use across most websites – my online banking passwords are separate from these to reduce the risk that they are compromised. However, none of the three I use regularly fitted the very strict requirements of the NS&I.
Which was…Wait for it…
Between 6 and 8 characters.
Minimum of 1 upper case letter, 1 lower case letter, 1 special character and 1 number.
Seriously!
So what did I do? Well I wrote it down. I won’t tell you where.
