Creating Strong Passwords — 6 Things to Consider
Tags: Privacy, Digital Life, Technology, Cybersecurity, Lifestyle

In this digital age, everyone should have had at least one instance where they had to create a password unless they have some kind of a secret oath to stay away from technology completely. Passwords are the first line of defense to protect our internet identities. Hence, it is highly imperative that we make them as strong as possible, and here are few things to keep in mind on your password creation journey.

1. Avoid Common Passwords and Phrases

I totally get it! Coming up with new passwords is tiring so it can be quite alluring to use the common words we use in our daily life or something that we already see on the screen. This is so much easier and less time-consuming right?

It was easy for you to come up with in a matter of minutes if not seconds. So, how long do you think it will take a potential hacker to guess it?

Yup, pretty much in no time.

If you are using any of the above mentioned or a variant of it as your password, you really aren’t securing anything with that flimsy password. A hacker will usually have a list of so-called common passwords that contains thousands of commonly used passwords and will be the first thing he/she tries out.

Let us just stay away from these easily guessable passwords, shall we?

2. Don’t Use Your Personal Information

I have an idea let me make a password using my name, date of birth and you know what I will go an extra mile and change all the ‘a’ to @. Now I have made myself a secure password and finally, I can rest my mind.

Woah, Woah, Woah! Let’s just take a minute and continue reading.

If a person is trying to hack you, there is a very high probability that they already know your full name, date of birth, and other information that is readily available in our social media profiles.

So yeah, personally identifiable information as your password, not a good idea.

3. Use Sentences as a Starting point

You cannot use your name, common phrases, phone number, and other things related to you, how can I create a password then?

Well, there is a trick I would like to share which I personally make use of. It’s quite simple actually.

Just take a sentence, it could be your favorite movie quote, an excerpt from your book, your favorite character catchphrase, from the lyric of your song, it could be anything the choices are yours. As an example, I am going to take the famous words by the greatest man I have known (through comics and movies), Captain America, from the movie Avengers: Endgame.

The world is in our hands. It’s left to us guys. We have to do something. Otherwise, Thanos should have killed all of us.

So, we have a sentence now, that too a pretty good one. Next just take the first two letters of each word in the sentence and get rid of the rest. After this, Captain Roger’s quote will now look something like this “ThwoisinouhaitletousguwehatodosootThshhakialofus”. Just keep in mind, this doesn’t have to be the first two letters, it can be the first letter, the last two letters, something from the middle, or anything you prefer. It is entirely up to your crazy side.

Let’s just now randomly change a few alphabets with special characters and numbers. If you don’t know what special characters are, it is just something like “@,!,#,$,& ”. I am going to replace all the ‘e’ with 3 and l with ‘!’ in the above example and the result is “Thwoisinouhait!3tousguw3hatodosootThshhakia!ofus”.

That is it! Now we have a password that cannot be easily guessed and a lot more secure than whatever you first thought of. Plus, it’s quite easy to remember right? You just have to remember the sentence.

4. Longer The Better

So now you know how to create a strong password. But then, most of us will try to create something that is only 8 characters long, why?

Because the website or the app told you that it requires a password “Minimum of 8 characters” long. So, it is common for our minds to be content with only 8 characters.

There is no need for you to compromise on this and stick to the minimum character length. Trust me it is entirely okay to go past the minimum character length, totally fine.

5. Never Repeat

Just because you have a strong password it doesn’t mean that you should repeat it for all your websites, subscriptions, and applications.

Because if by some misfortune one of the websites you have an account with has a breach and all their user credentials got leaked to the internet (Yup, that’s a thing. It happens more times than you think.).

Wouldn’t it be better if you had a different password for all your sites in that case instead of having to go change all your passwords everywhere?

6. You Could Always Use a Password Manager

I can see the wheels turning in your head wondering that it is going to be a lot of passwords to remember. This is going to be very hard If you don’t have a photographic memory like Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory or if you aren’t a robot.

Do not fret, the “Password managers” are here. These are software that allows you to generate and remember the password for all your sites. Many of these come with varied features like customizing the length of the password, controlling the characters that can be used, and much more. So, instead of remembering many passwords you just have to remember one master password for the password manager and the password manager will do the rest.

If you are one of those who use an Apple device the chances are you are already using a password manager. Apple has an in-built feature called iCloud Keychain. It suggests you passwords and also syncs them across all your devices. Alternatively, there are a lot of password managers available just a simple web search away.

Just search for “Best password manager” on the internet compare the options available and choose the one that suits you.