It’s easy to have a love/hate relationship with passwords. We know they are needed but it is so hard to remember all of them. Here are some tips and tricks to create memorable passwords.
First of all, make sure you don’t leave the default password for anything you use. Those default passwords are the same for all of those devices – some examples are security cameras, wireless routers, etc. Anyone who has that same device will know your password, which makes you very easy to hack.
Don’t use easy passwords like PASSWORD or 123456 or anything along those lines. (Check out this article on top ten most common passwords of 2019: https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/22/uk/most-common-passwords-scli-gbr-intl/index.html) This makes you more susceptible to being hacked.
Having a secure password doesn’t mean it has to be complicated. Just because it has to be 6 characters with at least one capital letter, one number, and one special symbol doesn’t mean it has to be hard to remember. This trick will help you create a hard, but easy to remember password. Find out how many characters the password has to be and any special requirements it has. Now think about a street you have lived on, a pet you had, a nickname, etc. Something you can easily remember. Use this as the base for your password. Then, start replacing letters with numbers and special characters to fit the criteria set for the password.
Here’s an example: say you lived on State Line growing up. The criteria for the password is at least one capital letter, one special character and one number. So we would convert State Line to match that criteria. So the password could be St@teL1ne. And as long as you use the same replacements for every password you create (i.e., a=@, i=1), it makes complicated passwords easier to remember.
While this seems a little complicated at first, the more you use this technique, the easier it will become.
Don’t use the same password or a variation of the same password for everything. If you do this, once one thing is hacked, everything else will be hacked shortly after. If they figured out the first one, they will easily figure out the rest.
Try not to write your passwords down. If you feel you must, do not put it somewhere it can easily be found. If someone sits at your desk, you don’t want them to have immediate access to everything. I recommend using a password manager. This will store all of your passwords and you only have one to remember. This is the securest solution.
As you can see, there are a few ways to make your accounts more secure when it comes to creating passwords.
