Five tips for creating your strong and memorable password
Choosing a password that is easy to use and safe against hackers seems difficult nowadays. Way too often, big organizations and websites are found to be vulnerable to hackers and leak millions of our passwords. Especially for this reason, it’s important to create strong passwords that are also unique for every system account you use. If you apply these five tips, you will be well protected — and without too much effort.
TIP #1. Use a story phrase instead of only one word
As we’ve been told for years, longer passwords are better than short ones. Eight characters should be the absolute minimum, but did you know that having long ones doesn’t have to be difficult? If you use a phrase with a short story, remembering your secret will get a whole lot easier. And that is important because writing it down and risking losing it out of sight would defeat the purpose. A good example could be “birds like drawing shoes”, which adds up to 24 characters!
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has a similar advise:
TIP #2. Pick random things that are not personal
Unfortunately, hackers have become very good at automatically guessing passwords based on our personal information. Because of this, things like your address details, special dates, and nick- or pet names should be avoided. It will be best to choose words for your story that are random to you. Our previous example could thus be further improved as follows: “my christmas lives in my treehouse”. Building on the “memory palace” technique, remembering information works best if the stories are as visual and strange as can be.
TIP #3. Steer away from tricks and pop references
We all have our little tricks that make our life easier. For passwords, however, that can backfire. For example, the password “1qazxsw23edc” looks complicated and strong, but it isn’t. As it can be created by running your finger over the left part of your keyboard, you most definitely won’t be the first to think of it. And using leaked databases, hackers can now automatically try the known passwords of millions of people to guess those of ours. That’s why smart tricks like these won’t help us to be safe, anymore. Similarly, pop culture references are also too widely used. The Beatles discography or that one special Gandhi quote should, therefore, better not be used for logging in.
TIP #4. Diversify the passwords that you care about most
To be safe, we can’t re-use our passwords for more than one system. As you protect your email account, choosing a different password for your social media login will help you should something bad happen to one of them. If we consider our story phrase, perhaps “my christmas lives in my treehouse” will work at Gmail since “christmas” makes us think of the color red in its logo. For the blue Twitter bird, our phrase could then change to “my ocean lives in my treehouse”, and so forth. Mix it up as you please, and be sure to apply subtle changes so it won’t be obvious how the passwords relate to the systems you’re using them for.
TIP #5. Random passwords work best with a password manager
The safest proven method to protect your digital accounts is to use a password manager. These applications can be installed on your laptop, tablet and phone, and often there is already one built into your browser. You may trust them, as they are well-protected by proven and strong mathematical technology. Generating strong passwords and remembering them for you is what password managers do best. And since you won’t need to enter your passwords manually anymore, they can be random and very complicated such as “okn*UY.4[22OO8w//lll1”. Better still, password managers will also be able to diversify your passwords for all your accounts. But be sure to select your so-called “master password” carefully using the previous tips, as it will serve as the key to all other ones. Luckily, it should be the last one for you to ever remember!
Better to be safe than sorry
We also think using passwords is more difficult than it should be, but protecting our digital lives should be worth the price. Luckily, with these tips, you can rest assured your new passwords are safer and easier to remember. As a final advice, consider your passwords as if it were your underwear. Don’t let them lie around for others to see and never share them with anyone!
