Stop using strong passwords, everywhere

New reports have come in after new research from Microsoft argues that weak passwords have their place, and for users to instead conserve their brainpower where it is needed instead of remembering complex and arbitrary passwords.
We've always been stressed to use strong and sophisticated passwords in case a “cyber-criminal” deciphers your pet's name or your surname joined with your year of birth.

So why the big change of heart?

Well apparently by not having to worry about remembering complex, unique passwords for every website, users can focus their efforts on recalling secure passwords only for high-value sites such as banking and e-commerce. Researchers Dinei Florêncio and Cormac Herley from the Redmond-based software company and Paul C van Oorschot from Carleton University in Canada, argue that password managers introduce more problems than they solve. While they allow the use of fully random, completely unique passwords, they also introduce a single point of failure: users can lose or forget the password to their password manager, or the cloud service that hosts their passwords could be hacked.

So what should users do instead? Without being overly complex as well as not trying to give anything away with my security practices, I've never had problems remembering my password(s) by following a simple task; you can try it too: Find a unique and custom number plate on someone else's car (ideally a stranger) and memorise it. It generally consists of a combination of letters and numbers that would form a word or phrase using abbreviations, making it easier to remember. You could then capitalise the first letter and even add an exclamation mark to the end. It's easy to remember, strong, comprises a mix of lower and upper case letters, includes special character as well as numbers and is a minimum of 6 characters. Not only is it relatively strong without straining the brain, but it's very easy to remember.