Five Easy Steps to Create Super Strong Passwords

Passwords are your first and last line of defense. Most people do not seem to understand the importance of this tool. It’s only when their account is hacked, password is stolen or some security is compromised with, that they bother to exercise due care in dealing with passwords. Creating an ultra-strong password and not sharing it with world is all it takes to be safe on the web.
Here’s a guide that will help you create an easy-to-remember but strong password.

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Essentials of a good password

1. Password should at least be 8-10 characters long.
2. Passwords should be a combination of numbers and letters.
3. Letters should be both capital and small.
4. At least one symbol or special character should be present.

Steps to create a strong password

Step 1. Select A Sentence: First step is to select an 8-10 words sentence. The important thing to keep in mind here is that the sentence should not be obvious or guessable. Any random sentence is good enough. Do not take guessable and/or short sentences like “I first name is XYZ“, etc. For the purpose of explaining, we will take the first line of this post as the sentence.

“Passwords are your first and last line of defense”.

Step 2. Trimming the words into characters: Reduce the words to their first letters. For example, “Passwords” can be reduced to “p“. Also, words like “are” can be changed to “r“, So our sentence gets reduced in the following manner:

Passwords [p] are [r] your [y] first [f] and[a] last[l] line[l] of[o] defense[d]

Now, the password looks like this: pryfallod
*
Step 3. Insert Numbers: As said before, a good password has both, numbers & alphabets. So to get numbers, we can do two things. Firstly, the word in Step 1 can be represented by numbers. In our example, “first” in the sentence can be represented by “1” instead of “f“. Secondly, letters in Step 2 can be converted into numbers which look similar. In the present case, the second last letter “o” can be changed to “0[zero]. Similarly you can substitute ” l” for “1“.

After this step, our password turns into: pry1all0d

Step 4. Capital & Small Cap Letters: Some of the letters in the password have to be capitalized. Now we arrive at the question, which ones? The first and last letter can be selected. Or, perhaps, those letters can be selected which are more prominent or more important. In our case, “passwords” and “defence” happen to be the most prominent words in the sentence. These words need not be at the end or start of the sentence.

Now our password looks like: Pry1all0D

Step 5. Special Characters or Symbols: Symbols lend and extra level of security to the password and make it nearly impossible to crack. One can randomly add a special character to the password or follow the same method that one did in Step 3 with numbers.

For instance, “l” can be replaced with “!” or “a” can be replaced with “@“. Or randomly substitute letters with symbols like changing “y” with “$“.

Final password: Pry1al!!d

key chain accessNow, this password is really difficult to crack. Looking at it, one may think that it would be really hard to memorize such a password. However, it isn’t that hard to remember it. In fact, by the time I complete writing the article, I myself have memorized the password. Moreover, even if you forget the password, you’ll always have the original sentence to help you recall the password.

Now that you have a good password, here are a couple of things you should take care of;

* You should never share password with somebody else, not even your best buddy or spouse.
* You should never write down your password anywhere, neither on a paper nor in notepad or document file.
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