Everyone has heard about the importance of creating complex passwords for security reasons, and no, abc123 is not safe at all. It’s also clear that complex passwords are very difficult to remember and even more so when it comes to accounts that we do not use daily, so the following are some helpful some tips to make your passwords highly secure and also easy to remember.
1. Work From A Sentence
It seems simple, right? But yes, working from a phrase we can create a secure password taking into account that it is a phrase that we know by heart but one that others have hardly heard and would not necessarily know of. The phrase should not be too short so that it is not easy to guess, nor too long so we can forget it, and of course remember that alphanumeric passwords are almost always requested, so we can combine numbers and letters and use capital letters. An example could be, “At Walmart sodas cost $2”, now the next step is to take only the first letters of each word and it will look like this: Awsc$2. In the event that the password requires you to also use a symbol, you can add a period or an asterisk at the end.¹
2. Change Vowels For Numbers
Surely you have heard this trick before and yes, maybe many know it and you feel that it may be insecure, but certainly you wouldn’t put your pet’s name Max or the name of your child as a password right? Or at least let’s hope so. For this tip let’s use two words, for example, “Keyboard” and “head”, now let’s put the words together replacing vowels with numbers, example, “K3yb04rdh34d.” It’s a bit complicated looking, but it’s actually easy to remember, and you can do it with simple words that you know no one else will easily guess.²
3. Combining Two Words
Taking the example above we are going to combine the words “keyboard” and “head” interspersing the letters of each word. The end password would be something like this, “Kheeyabdoard.” We can also combine it with the tip above, replacing vowels with numbers, in this example it would come out as “Kh33y4bd04rd.” Believe me, no one else would want to memorize this password.³
4. The Keyboard Trick
Again we are going to do some replacements, but this time numbers are going to be replaced by letters. First we are going to choose a succession of figures that is easy for us to remember, it can be your cell phone number, postal code or the number of your street, let’s say we will use the postal code 27561. Now let’s look on our keyboard for the letter that is below each number and we put it next to each of our numbers, an example is, 2wsx7ujm5tgb6yhn1qaz, to make it a little more difficult we can put some capital letters and add one or more symbols.¹
5. Leave Out Vowels
Now let’s continue replacing, but in this case we will replace the vowels entirely. Let’s continue using our example of “Keyboard head” but with the combination of ” Kheeyabdoard.” Now we remove the vowels and the result will be: “Khybdrd” and to complicate it a bit we can add two numbers: ” Khy2bdrd0.” Always remember to use numbers, capital letters and symbols, since most accounts require these to be in passwords.³
6. A Mixed Word and Number
“This could be very simple and easy for a hacker to guess”, you may be thinking at this moment, but the trick is to place some of the characters in reverse and insert letters and numbers. To understand it better we will continue with our previous examples, “Keyboard “and our zip code 27561. The word will go the same and the numbers in reverse, then we will have something like this,” K1e6y5b7o2ard.” Ingenious, right? Now we just need to add a symbol and voila, no hacker would guess this password easily.²
In conclusion, although some of these tips may seem cliche, they can really help you create secure passwords that are also easy to remember. It’s necessary to change our passwords fairly often as well, and you should not use the same password for all our accounts. Also, if it’s possible try to avoid any relationship with yourself or your life since it is the first thing that a hacker would aim to guess, so remember that the name of your cat Gigi654 is better as a username than a password.
[1] https://smallbiztrends.com/2015/02/ways-to-remember-passwords.html
[2] https://qz.com/230093/this-is-how-to-remember-all-your-passwords-and-keep-them-safe/
[3] https://thenextweb.com/basics/2019/08/25/dont-be-an-idiot-heres-how-to-store-and-remember-all-your-passwords/