Creating a Secure Password

In an recent article by Bdaily business news it was reported that in a recent cyber attack 2 million passwords were stolen of which only 22% were strong. So already I can hear people clicking their mouse and switching off but please bear with me a little while.

It is often said how do they expect me to remember these complex passwords, we all know we like to use words that are easy for us to remember like our names or favorite place. However these are easy to guess for some one so in this article I am going to help you get round this problem.

I am sure we all remember when we were bored at school in math’s lessons say playing with calculators to make words, for example punching in 71077345 then turning the calculator upside down to display shell oil.

How does this help I hear you ask well let me explain

Firstly lets think of a name that’s easy to remember say Albert Einstein, we can use this and just by adding say a dot or hyphen make it harder to guess.

For example our password might be Albert-Einstein or Albert.Einstein easy to remember but a bit more difficult for the hackers to guess. However we can make it even more difficult by changing letters for character or numbers and changing the case of the letters let me break it down and show you what I mean

Letter Replacement character or number

A @ a
L l or 1 or ! or 7
B b or 8
E e or 3 €
R r
T t
E 3 or e €
I I or 1 or !
N n ^
S s 5 $
T t
E 3 or e or €
I I or ! or 1
N n ^

I am sure you are getting the idea, to make it easy all you have to do is make a decision say from now on all my passwords that contain an a I will use the @ symbol and all e’s will be replaced with a 3 . I am sure you can come up with many more e.g. 4 for an h the secret is to choose and remember to always use the same characters to substitute.

Try to make you passwords at least 8 characters long and have 2 upper case letters two lower case letters two numbers and two characters. Never ever reveal your password or the methodology you use or characters you replace as your standard. Whilst nothing is 100 % this will make it harder for hackers to compromise your account.

Please remember it is bad practice to use the same password on all your accounts so to make it easy for you to remember your password for say YouTube you might and “You” as the first 3 letters of your password but remember try to make a substation for example replace the o with a 0 (zero). You don’t have to follow this example you could choose your own prefix or add it at the end of your password or in the middle.