Creating a strong password is a must today in order to help you safely protect your online transactions. Without it, you’ll be left vulnerable to intrusions, stolen personal information, spam, viruses and more. You don’t want to know that reason your friends and family are getting spammed, viruses is because your email account was hacked. Or imagine if this happens to your credit card or your bank account? The ramification can be devastating. So before it reaches this level, you can take some very simple steps to creating a strong password.
The question that most people ask is “How I can remember these long strings of letters, numbers and characters?” Well it is very simple and as you will see in this article, it will take two steps to get it done, really. And it may end up being fun. But before we dig in into how to create a complicated password, we are going to play a memory game.
Let’s say we have these five objects to remember in order: car, frame, hammer, spoon and sun. The trick to remembering these words or items right away is to compose a sentence with all of them. It does not have to make sense. The sentence just needs to create actions. It will look like this: “In my car, I framed a picture with my hammer and hanged the spoon right over it under the sun.” You have now composed a sentence with all 5 words and created actions out of them. If you picture yourself doing these actions, you will immediately remember all 5 words as soon as they are presented to you.
We will use the same analogy to create complicated password in 2 easy steps.
1. Select your favorite words, date/time (number) and a character.
2. Make a sentence with all of them.
Let’s say I like colors, fruits and I have great (or bad) memories that happened at a specific time. Let’s use the information below:
Words/Numbers/Characters: Red, banana, &,1975
The password will be: Redbanana&1975
Words/Numbers/Characters: Clown,scared,!,1999
The password will be: Clownscared!1999
Or something more fun:
Words/Numbers/Characters: In, 1975, I, became,*
The password will be: In1975ibecame*
Words/Numbers/Characters: @, 12PM, friday, ihave, $
The password will be: @12PMfridayihave$
Try using the first word in upper case; add some numbers, one simple character and you are done. These are strong passwords and you can make all kind of combinations. This will take about 10 minutes of your time but I can assure you, it will be the best 10 minutes you spent.
Remember to use a password for each one of your major account and try changing them as often as you memory can allow it.
Jacob Ouaknine is Sales Engineer and Account Manager at M6iT Consulting