5 Steps to making passwords strong and memorable

By now I guess you’ve heard about Heartbleed.

A bug that affects the OpenSSL service, which is a cryptographic library that’s used to encrypt data on more than two-thirds of all the websites on the Internet. (Source: Hongkiat.com)

I know it’s a pain to have to keep coming up with new passwords, but unless you’re using a password manager, you’ll have to. I am going to show you how to create passwords, time after time, with ease and they will all be strong and memorable; to you!. (Photo credit: marc falardeau via photopin cc)

Fear your weakness, not a virus’ strengths

For many of you, it’s the fear of these type of security breaches that prevent you from conducting any activity online. But you’re missing out because a fear that can be easily managed by having a really strong password. How many of you have used the same password for many of the sites that need a login? Even though you know it’s not a good idea? I’m holding my hands up, I’ve been guilty of doing this!

Unique and complicated—your passwords, not you!

The secret to ensuring your password is of brute force strength is two-fold: unique and complicated. Also, having more than the standard 8 characters can help a great deal.

So, don’t go patting yourself on the back if you have a really long password, but you use it for many different accounts. Neither should you give up reading this post if you use unique passwords that are dictionary based.

Strong and memorable passwords

So the problem is thinking you have to remember letters. You don’t! Follow these steps:

1. Select a handful of phrases, quotes, affirmations, etc.
2. Take the first letter of each word in that phrase
3. Use symbols
4. Include numbers
5. Mix uppercase and lowercase letters

In practice

Let’s build up a password from these simple steps. I’ve chosen the quote:

If you can dream it, you can do it

While I’ve used the first letter of each word, you could have a system of taking the second or the last. You could even take the first letter from the first word, the second letter from the second, and so forth.

Taking the first letter of each word:

iycdiycdi

Using some symbols:

i$yc!diycdi

Adding in some numbers

i$yc!diycdi79

Changing some letters to uppercase

i$yc!DiyCdi79

Go ahead and start creating some strong passwords for your online accounts. You can use the online password checker, Password Meter, to see if you’ve come up with a secure password.

Do you have a trick for remembering passwords? Tweet me! (But please don’t share any real passwords.)