Creating a strong password is a must today to help you protect your online transactions safely. Without it, you’ll be vulnerable to hacks, stolen personal information, spam, viruses, and more. You don’t want to know that the reason your friends and family are getting spam, viruses is because your email account was hacked. Or imagine if this happens to your credit card or bank account? The branching can be devastating. So before you reach this level, you can follow some very simple steps to create a strong password.
The question most people ask is “How can I remember these long strings of letters, numbers, and characters?” Well, it’s very simple and as you’ll see in this article, it will take two steps to do it, actually. And it can end up being fun. But before we dive into how to create a complicated password, let’s 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 doesn’t have to make sense. The prize only needs to create actions. It will look like this: “In my car, I framed a picture with my hammer and hung the spoon right over it in the sun.” Now he has composed a sentence with the 5 words and has created actions from them. If you imagine yourself doing these actions, you will immediately remember the 5 words as soon as they are presented to you.
We’ll use the same analogy to create a complicated password in 2 easy steps.
1. Select your favorite words, date/time (number) and a character.
2. Say a prayer 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 following information:
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 funnier:
Words/Numbers/Characters: In 1975, I became*
The password will be: In1975ibecame*
Words/Numbers/Characters: @, 12PM, Friday, got, $
The password will be: @12PMfridayihave$
Try to capitalize the first word; add some numbers, a simple character and you’re done. These are strong passwords and you can do all kinds of combinations. This will take about 10 minutes of your time, but I can assure you it will be the best 10 minutes you’ve ever spent.
Remember to use one password for each of your main accounts and try to change them as often as your memory allows.
Jacob Ouaknine is a sales engineer and account manager at M6iT Consulting