What Is a Secure Password?

Cybersecurity for non-developers

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash

Passwords are the keys to the locks that secure our accounts: Your email, bank and investment account, social media, company portals, and many more use password-based authentication. They all ask you to create a secure password and sometimes give you rules like this:

• Minimum of 8 characters
• At least one digit, lower case letter, upper case letter, special character
• No consecutive 3 digits

However, I have seen some non-developers struggle to find a good password. After reading this article, you should be able to come up with secure strong passwords that you can memorize.

Photo by Arget on Unsplash

The Attackers Perspective

Feel free to ignore this (more technical) section and jump directly to the Secure Password recipe. This section is not required to understand how to create secure passwords.

You want to protect yourself against two scenarios:

1. The attacker wants to get access to your account. They can’t break the web service, so they try to see if you used a bad password.