Technical ESOs for 11th Graders: Creating Secure Passwords

At Enlightium Academy, students have Expected Student Outcomes (ESOs) for each grade level. This means that upon completing the 11th grade, each student is expected to grow not just academically, but spiritually and socially.

One of the three academic ESOs is technical capabilities. Upon reviewing this article, students in 11th grade are expected to understand the reason for creating secure passwords.

Passwords can be a beast. Below are some practical (and actually sort of fun) actions for you to take to stay on top of your passwords.

Avoid basic passwords.

Basic passwords include:

• password
• starwars
• increasing numbers (12345678)

Basic passwords are a bad idea. It’s not difficult to find someone’s email address, and then hackers can run through the statistically most common passwords. A basic password with no other barriers means that someone can access your account and you may never even know it.

Use a passphrase.

Passphrases are easy to remember and incredibly difficult to hack. While a password is typically one or two words, maybe with a random number or characters thrown in, a passphrase is a series of seemingly random letters, numbers, and characters that makes sense to you and only you.

Think of a song you like, such as “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley. The chorus goes:

Never gonna give you up.
Never gonna let you down.
Never gonna run around and desert you.

A passphrase takes the first letter of each word and substitutes numbers and characters when possible. For this example, the passphrase would be:

Nggyu.Nglyd.Ngra&dy.

That password is 20 characters, include lowercase, uppercase and special characters. And it will be incredibly difficult to hack and incredibly easy to remember.

Other best practices for creating passwords.

1. Update your passwords every 6 months (set up a calendar reminder), as well as any time that you feel that your password may have been compromised.
2. You can use the same password for multiple accounts, but anything dealing with finances should each have its own unique password.
3. You can use a tool such as LastPass to save your passwords.

Take this short quiz.