Introduction
We know that you have heard this message again and again and again, so we’re going to cut straight to the helpful bits…
Key Points
- 12 characters or more.
- Upper & Lowercase & symbols.
- Avoid info that can be pulled from social media (family names, maiden names, birthplace, D.O.B… I’m sure you understand)
- Don’t reuse a password.
- Password Managers are good.
- It is better to have 2FA than to not have 2FA.
Here are 2 methods that you can use to create a strong memorable password.
3 Random Words
PlaneBushDog Play around with the capital letters PlanebUshdoG
ManSkyPencil Add a few symbols in Man!Sky&Pencil.
GreenPaperSign You could do both greeN!PapeR&SigN.
Song Lyrics
This is a personal favourite. Pick a song that you are familiar with. It could be your favourite song. But not one that you are known for.
If you are constantly blogging about this song, the song lyrics are on your email footer, you sing this song constantly at your desk… then pick your second favourite song! The password needs to be as hard as possible to crack.
It is best to choose one of the more obscure lines in the song rather than the chorus.
If we take Elton John – Rocket Man as an example.
‘She packed my bags last night pre-flight
Zero hour nine AM
And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then
I miss the earth so much I miss my wife
It’s lonely out in space
On such a timeless flight”
The lines highlighted above…
”Zero hour nine AM
And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then ”
If we take the first character of each word, we get…
ZhnAAIgbhaakbt
This is a fairly strong password and we can make it even stronger by substituting certain characters for symbols.
ZhnAAIgbhaakbt becomes Zhn44!gbh44kbt This is a strong password!
When you reach the point where you can insert my password easily and quickly, you could make it even longer.
ZhnAAlgbhaakbt
Could become…
Zhn44!gbh44kbt as we did above.
Then we could add in the next line of lyrics
Zhn44!gbh44kbt + ”I miss the earth so much I miss my wife”
Zhn44!gbh44kbtImtesmImmw
Again, you could substitute certain characters for symbols.
Zhn44!gbh44kbt!mt3sm!mmw
You could even insert a line from a completely different song.
Choosing a song that you know ensures that you will remember the sequence of words, and from this sequence, you can pull the password.
Adding symbols makes this process more complicated but persevere, it’s worth it!
