A Simple Method For Generating Good Passwords

I came across an article while browsing this evening which talked about setting good strong passwords for all your accounts.

Having a weak password for anything is asking for trouble nowadays as hackers get more and more sophisticated. Many people make it even easier by choosing passwords that almost anyone could guess. Some examples of really weak passwords are:

• 123456
• password
• qwerty
• iloveyou (topical one for valentines day)
• 11111
• admin
• welcome

Other weak passwords include your name, your partner's name, your children's name, your pet's name or your favourite sports team. Anyone that knows anything about you (or can view your Facebook profile) will be able to find this info.

A strong password looks something like this:

Tjsdih5$g879FG!56

It would take one hell of a guess for a hacker to figure this one out but at the same time - good luck remembering it yourself if you need to access your account.

How To Create a Strong Password that you can remember

Here's a tip I learned a while ago for creating a strong password that you will actually be able to remember.

First of all you need to decide on a specific phrase that you will be able to remember. The phrase should include words and numbers.

Then you need to decide on a couple of rules for your phrase.

Let's look at an example.

Let's say I decide to pick a phrase based on my child. I might choose a phrase such as (this is purely fictitious by the way)

My daughter Carla was born on the 27 of September 2004 in Belfast General Hospital

Hopefully that phrase would be something you would be able to remember. Next you need to decide on a couple of rules. You need to decide which letters will be capitals and you need to decide where to insert a special character - something other than a letter or number - eg %$&+! etc.

You could decide to use capital letters for the nouns in your phrase or you might decide to make letters 3,6,9 and 12 a capital. You might also decide to add a ! at position 2 and 10, or maybe start and end. Whatever you decide - make sure to memorize it.

For this example I am going to choose the rules: Capitals for nouns. I am going to add the @ symbol at position 5 and at the end.

I now choose the first letter of each word in the phrase, include the numbers, and add my rules. Here's what my password now looks like:

mdCw@bot27oS2004iBGH@

This is a very strong password but as long as you remember your chosen phrase and rules you should be able to enter your password when needed.

It's also a good idea to use a password manager like Lastpass, Dashlane or Keepass to store all your passwords. However, this is only as secure as the master password you use to log into your account so you will need to be able to produce and remember at least one good password.

There's no point having all these super strong passwords saved in your password manager if the password to access them all is iloveyou !!

I hope you found this useful.

Have a great weekend

Dave