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Steve Gibson's Password Haystacks page dispels the conventional wisdom about passwords, i.e.: a long random string of characters takes longer to crack with a brute force attack than an easy to remember phrase.
It's not the apparent complexity but the range of characters you use. Create your password using upper case and lower case letters, numbers and whatever symbols are allowed and the password |ILike2Eat4Pancakes| is just as complex as ]A2n73\fnSq|nwPmwXX[ (1 out of 3,622,996,024,341,650,240,846,169,344,922,329,517,120 20-character passwords from 95 possible characters).
Rule of thumb: use all of the available characters a website allows to make an easy to remember password and you'll be just as safe as letting your cat walk across the keyboard to generate a random password.
It's not the apparent complexity but the range of characters you use. Create your password using upper case and lower case letters, numbers and whatever symbols are allowed and the password |ILike2Eat4Pancakes| is just as complex as ]A2n73\fnSq|nwPmwXX[ (1 out of 3,622,996,024,341,650,240,846,169,344,922,329,517,120 20-character passwords from 95 possible characters).
Rule of thumb: use all of the available characters a website allows to make an easy to remember password and you'll be just as safe as letting your cat walk across the keyboard to generate a random password.
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