The scourge of skimmers
May 10, 2016
Speed is the key
May 24, 2016
Did you watch the clip? If you didn’t take a moment to do so.
Hopefully you recognized the clip coming from the Mel Brooks classic Spaceballs. While funny there is a lot we can learn from this clip. Just in case you are not familiar with the movie, Planet Spaceball, lead by President Skroob (Brooks), is running out of breathable air and needs to steal the air from Planet Druidia and King Roland (Dick Van Patten) in order to survive. To gain leverage they kidnap Roland’s daughter Princess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga) and get the passcode to the Air Shield. The evil Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) manages to extract the password from Roland after threatening to torture Vespa. The password is 12345.
Most people probably get a chuckle out of this scene when the movie is on but this should serve as a warning to everyone. Not only that back in the 1980’s was 12345 a bad password but that someone would use that to protect the item that was essential to their planet’s survival was comical (or Skroob’s luggage but we won’t go there). Think of this as your business. Hopefully you are not using 12345 as a password for anything (or any generic password or default password).
So what could King Roland have used for a good password that was also easy to remember, after all Roland has to have a lot to do as a king? We’ll start with his planet, Druidia. Let’s change the I’s to 1’s and the a to @ (not all services allow for the use of symbols) and keep the capital D: Dru1d1@. Today most passwords need to be minimum 8 characters so we’ll add some extra characters. Now the password will become: p90XDru1d1@. And then adding some numbers on the end can’t hurt: p90XDru1d1@1989. The longer the password the better. Now King Roland has a much more secure password, he just needs to keep his daughter away from the Spaceballs!
If you just want to create a password from scratch, try this site: http://passwordsgenerator.net
