Snowden berates John Oliver over his password strength

ByCraig Haley

According to ex-NSA employee and whistle-blower Edward Snowden, a good password to have is margaretthatcheris110%sexy.

For those who prefer plain English, that’s Margaret Thatcher is 100% sexy.

In an interview with John Oliver, Snowden discusses what makes a good password. Needless to say, Snowden wasn’t impressed by Oliver’s admission that his password only contained a mere 5 characters.

“You’re killing me” he exclaims.

A good password – or as Snowden says – a pass-phrase, should be easy to remember and should be longer than 8 characters.

Watch the video at the bottom of the article…

And for those looking for some useful password tips, here is a quick recap –

– Don’t use a word in the dictionary.
– The password should be longer than 8 characters
– It should contain both lowercase & uppercase letters, numbers and at least 1 symbol
– Don’t use the same password for all your online accounts
– Make sure you won’t forget your password…
– …but this doesn’t mean writing it down everywhere
– Don’t create a file on your hard drive called passwords.doc with all your passwords in it
– Change your password regularly. Okay, we could say every week, but who’s going to do that? An average user should change passwords to important accounts every few months.

Watch the video below.

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