A secure and memorable password is obviously a good way to protect your important information online, but sometimes passwords which you think are secure or hard to guess are actually worse than you might realise. Thankfully, there are a few easy tips to help you come up with stronger passwords which you can actually remember too.
Hackers these days are a crafty bunch. With desktop computers getting cheaper and more powerful, it can often take a far shorter time for someone to crack your passwords than it used to. I’m not going to go into the details of how it’s done, but there are a few myths that people believe will make their passwords secure which aren’t necessarily true any more. As an example, something like Jason99! is not a strong password. Even though it has a capital letter, some numbers and even a symbol, a desktop computer could crack this in about three days. You might be thinking “Yeah… Jason is a common name, hardly a good example”, but even Jfxue99! would be just as bad.
Longer Password = Stronger Password
When it comes to passwords, size really does matter. The more characters in your password, the longer it will take to hack, simply because there are more combinations of letters for a hacker to work through. Throw in a few capitals, numbers and a symbol and you’re well on the way to a secure password.
My favourite method for a secure and memorable password
There are tons of ways to create a strong password, but by far the one I use the most is the ‘phrase method’.
- Think of a phrase; it could be a song lyric, quote from a film, or any statement that you’re going to remember.
- String the words together and try to add capital letters, numbers and symbols for good measure. For example “Oceans11isagoodfilm!” or “LadyGagaisapopstar*”.
If you follow those two steps, you’ll likely create a secure and memorable password which is not in the dictionary, long, hard to guess yet easy to remember. If you want to get really clever you can add the name of the site/service your password is for to make it longer and different for each website eg. “Oceans11isagoodfilm!Facebook”
Test your password strength
If you want to see how secure (or easy to crack) your passwords are, head over to:
www.nordpass.com/secure-password
Try yours out, you might be surprised.