Password help. How the hell do I do this?

[BarbaraofSeville]

I'm not a stupid person honestly, in fact I'm very intelligent.

But I've just come back from leave to find that my password has expired and my work has made the requirements much more complicated and I've locked myself trying to change it.

So I have to go into the office to be present in person for a meeting I can't join online because I can't log in but I'll still need a new password.

The new rules say it needs to be 14 characters long with an unspecified number of special characters. The IT help desk work about 4 hours a day and take hours to respond so I won't get help from them anytime soon.

Of course im not allowed to write it down but I'm perimenopausal and almost certainly have ADHD so the chances of me remembering a random string of 14+ letters numbers and symbols is approximately zero.

Any suggestions? Of course this could be the trigger for me to quit a desk based job that I've come to hate and retrain as a truck driver, which I've always fancied.

I once changed my password to whythefuckdoineedtochangemypassword everymonth, which was fairly embarrassing when I had to go in person to IT as some of the secondary applications that update their password from the active directory flipped out as it exceeded the character limit.

our health service was hit by a catastrophic cyber attack last year. Whole thing was down for weeks. I heard a hacker-turned-expert say the safest thing you could do is use a password manager and generate random of characters. Bonus for only having to remember one password.

The biggest risk of password breach is online. The chance of someone breaking into your house to find a password to access your work is miniscule. Write it down amongst other things in a book.

For the ones that change every month, but cant be any of the last 1000 passwords I just incorporate the month and year into the password
i.e.

JunB@n@nn@22

Think of a rhyme or poem, (say Twinkle twinkle) then take the first letter of each word, change any that are vowels to a number or special character.

TTLSH9WWY8 and so on

First line or two of your favourite song. Use the first letters of the words.
"Yesterday all my troubles seemed so far away" /day and month of a birthday or anniversary/couple of question marks
Yamtssfa0507??

You can write it down. How would work know?

For special characters, use a memorable number and press shift.
So end the password !£%& but think of it as 2468

I tend to use car registration numbers as the base of mine - nice mix of letters and numbers I'm likely to remember.

Common misconception about passwords - the original rules were based on trying to thwart humans - so avoiding things that people would know about you, common patterns or numbers for example an Liverpool fan using LFC96.

Now that most compromises are made by phishing, or bruteforce using computers, frequently changing plus having a very long password makes the biggest difference - a computer is completely agnostic as to whether you use the @, or a 1 or an I.... it doesn't see one as any more likely as the other, it just uses what rules it knows about the passwords parameters and common substitutions and methodically works through all the possibilities.

an 8 character alphabetical password has around 200-billion possibilities - breakable in around 30mins, alpaha numeric around 9 hours, 15 character password 3500 years.

It sounds a lot but the timings are based on a single processor thread, most computers are multithreaded, and most hackers use multiple computers in tandem, which could condense that 9 hours to a matter of seconds....

AI is going to be interesting - neural nets that use a combination of brute force, plus harvesting data available about you from your social media etc, random password generation or quantum cryptography may soon be the only secure answer....

Use a tool like LastPass. It can generate and store complex passwords for you so you don't forget them.

Use a song, but lthe first letters from the words of the lyrics for as many as you need. Eg All things bright and beautiful all creatures great and small would be Atbabacgas - capitalnat the start and you could use the ampersand for the "ands" which would be the special symbol taken care of and then stick a number on the end - then when you need to change it next time just increase the number by 1.

I use addresses and add special characters. E.g.

10H!ghStreet@nywhere

And keep a note on my phone to remind me which address (home, parents, grandma etc and where the special characters are).