How to Create Strong Easy to Remember Passwords

Just like you lock your home when everyone leaves for the day, your passwords are your locks or safety latches in the virtual world. In today’s age, you use passwords for almost everything; whether it be logging into your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Skype accounts or for your study websites that help in completing your homework, sites that help you buy books or games online, etc. These sites ask questions and gather a lot of personal information about you which you might not want to share with everybody.

This makes creating an easy to recall, strong and totally unique password extremely important. Ensuring that your password is as special as you is a practice which will double the chances of using the internet in a safe and protected manner.

VERY IMPORTANT TIP:  At times, browsers and websites ask whether you would want them to “Remember Password” so that you don’t have to enter it every time you access your account. Although it is not a completely safe practice to use this option, you can choose to do so if and only if the sites are reliable and frequently used. Also never save passwords or check the “Remember Me” option when you are using computers or other devices that are being shared with anyone. These could be when you are using a friend’s device or are at a cyber cafe.

How To Create An Uncrackable Password

1. Must have minimum 12 characters:
A long password ensures a minimum strength. Although usually there is no minimum required length, one should choose a password of at least 12-14 characters to ensure maximum security.

2. Include Numbers, Symbols, Capital Letters, and Lowercase Letters:
A good mix of all the above types of characters makes the password very hard to crack.
For example: K0lkaTa45#

3. Avoid words directly from the Dictionary:
Stay away from dictionary words and combinations of dictionary words. Any word on its own might be easy to guess. A combination of a few words, especially if the words are easy or obvious, is also a bad idea.
For example, “house” is a very weak password. “Red house” is also equally unsecure.

4. Obvious substitutions are a bad idea:
Don’t use common substitutions either. For example, if your name is “Mohan” and you use “M0han” as your password, it is very easily guessable by someone who knows you or also automatic hacking bots. So just because you’ve replaced an o with a 0 might not help keep your password safe.

5. Avoid using names and birthdays:
Using your own name and your birthdays as passwords is way too common now, and therefore easily guessable by anyone who knows your date of birth. Birthdays are easy to hack through various online platforms that ask your age and hence it is a not an advisable suggestion for a password. Names are too obvious to decipher.

5 Methods to Create an Unbreakable Password That You Can Easily Remember

Sometimes, we get so carried away with creating a difficult password, that we ourselves tend to forget the password when we try logging in after a short span of time. This can also sometimes happen when the password is easy. Managing and keeping your passwords unique is an important part of password creation.

1. Turning an easy sentence into a password:
The sentence can be anything personal and memorable. You can take the words from the sentence, abbreviate and combine it in a unique way to form your password. For example:

“To be, or not to be – that is the question” = “2B,OrX2B-Tis7?”

This is a strong password with 14 different characters. Use of symbols, upper and lower case letters make it hard to crack. Plus all you need is your favourite quote or sentence that you will always remember.

2. Turn your goal into a password and stay motivated:
One very motivating way to go about this is to use your goal as your password. Every time you login, you will be reminded to work towards it and stay motivated 🙂

For example, if you goal is to join Stephens College next year in 2016, your password could be: Stephen$2016#

3. Turning Nursery rhymes into password:
The way this works is you choose one of your favourite nursery rhymes, capitalize the first letter of each sentence, replace certain letters with numbers, and follow that up with an exclamation point or some other symbol at the end. For example:

“Twinkle twinkle little star. How I wonder what you are” Password: “TT7*.H1W?UR!”

4. Using a favourite line from a song or movie:
A similar technique like the previous one, but little more fun. You can choose from the myriad of your favourite songs or dialogues of your favourite actor and turn it into a password. For example:

In the movie Spider-man Uncle Ben says the words, “With great power, comes great responsibility” to Peter Parker shortly before getting killed by a carjacker. This can be turned into “WGr8+,cGR8r$pn$BLt”.

You can use any of these techniques or come up with something of your own, but the idea is to develop a password that is unpredictable, unusual, and has a variety of types of characters, so that hacking that password becomes a near impossibility.

Stay safe!

Happy Passwording! 🙂