Not reusing passwords is extremely important.

There isn't an arbitrary length that makes you "safe."

"prohibitively1" is about as hard to crack as "dinosaur1". They're both long English words with a number added. The number of letters isn't very relevant.

The people who do this for fun/profit are savvy to the ways people usually come up with passwords. They're not just writing programs to try "aaa", "aab", etc. They look at the psychology of password-choosing, the recorded history of passwords people use, and (whenever possible) the password criteria of the target website.

Things like the Adobe hack are obviously significant if you had an account with them and are using the same password + email elsewhere. Less obviously, it's significant if you are using the same password that anyone who had an account with Adobe used, regardless of the email address: all of those passwords are all now in dictionaries of known passwords.

Here's a great article on the topic: Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like "qeadzcwrsfxv1331"

I have a security tiered system. I have one that I use for things I don't care if someone knows.
I have one that I would share with those close to me, and I have one that no one will ever know.

And then I have list of ones that have to change and can't be re used. The list is protected by the last.

I have a couple cards in my rolodex on my desk, under "C" for computer, with all my passwords written on them. And they are all pretty much the same password. I suck at security.

I have an idea for a difficult password that I could remember, but it is long and a pain to type because you have to think as you are typing.

It's the house number of my childhood neighbor, followed by the initials of each of the members of that family in descending age order, followed by the house number of another neighbor, and their initials. Or instead of neighbors, it could be a relative, or celebrity family.

so it would look something like this:

78jbbbrbdb74jsdstsds

not terribly long, but it is unique. If everyone used this system it would be easy to hack, so I don't know why I'm announcing it, but there you go.

You could also do the first letter of each word of a poem you memorized in your youth:
lmcayshotmroproteoaisfhasinawrtfday

or combine the two:
lmcayshotmroproteoaisfhasinawrtfday78jbbbrbdb74jsdstsds

You just have to take 3 minutes to type the damn thing in as you think about it and carefully type.

Thank you so much. I had not read anything like that before. Very interesting.
Maybe I enjoyed it so much because I also enjoy the WWII stories about breaking military codes, etc.

Interesting chart:

Attachment 46167

apart from the Colossus book by Prof. Copeland which I think I mentioned in another thread, you need 'Codes, ciphers secrets and cryptic communication' by Fred B. Wrixon. US$17.95, CAN$24.95, £12.95.
704 pages of good stuff, and some freaky heavy duty shit in there to keep you awake.