How to Make a Good Online Password

Making a good online password is today one of the most important aspects that we need to be aware of, specially if we have a strong presence on the Internet, or online if you prefer. Like anyone using the online world today, we have most likely a lot of accounts that need passwords. Bank accounts, social networks, new startups we might consider checking out, email accounts, blogs, forums, access to our company’s server, you name it.

Though we should maintain unique passwords for important services (like company servers, bank accounts and some important email accounts), it still is a pain to determine what password we should create and worst of all, having to remember passwords for every service we are using online. In most cases, it is possible that you find yourself reusing the same passwords, over and over again. Needless to say that, such practice is obviously not recommended. Regardless of how strong your password can be, once it is compromised, it is one big invitation for a hacker to gain access on other services you use.

How are passwords created?
Basically there are two ways that passwords are generated. You either create it yourself (e.g. signing up for a Google Account), and the other computer generated (normally temporary passwords). One other important aspect is that in almost all cases, a username is also required to log in a specific service. Such usernames are created just the same way as passwords are. As a side note, don’t forget to immediately change any computer generated password you have obtained.

What is a strong password?
A password is considered to be strong when it is very complicated (even for automated calculations) to discover. A set of random characters, that are between 8 – 10 characters long will be a good start. The longer the better. If you can add in some symbols, like @?&%, even better. Last, but not least, strong passwords are those that are stored in our head. We do not have them written down anywhere at all. No PDA, no protected excel sheet, no piece of paper, mobile phone, nowhere.

What is a weak password?
Your own name, a member of a family’s name, your pet, birthday, favorite color, your car’s brand, your license plate, your telephone number, your social security number, etc. are normally considered to be poor choices when creating your password. You may even combine all this and make it more difficult for a hacker, like writing them backwards, etc., and still be considered weak. These are still options to consider, but quite frankly, they are weak and it still does not solve the matter of having too many passwords to remember.

That said, what if I told you, that I use a strong password that is unique and different at the same time. Sounds impossible? Well, read on.

As I mentioned earlier, complicated enough is to have different passwords with different user names. After a lengthy exercise and an awful lot of research on the subject, I finally came up with a simple yet powerful way to make this password madness a little easier. It’s a simple way to only have to remember one password, but at the same time, being different for every service.

How to Make the Password?
First step. Rather than thinking of a word for your password, remember a phrase instead. For example: “Why Do I Need A Password?”. Then take the first letter of each word, which is this case will be: WDINAP? (Note that I left the question mark on purpose). This method makes your password look very random, and since it has a symbol at the end, makes it even stronger.

How to make this unique and different? First step is already unique in itself. Now the second part will make it different and yet easy to remember. Say you need a password for your bank (ex. Bank Of America). Just take the first letters of the name – BOA and add it to your phrased password. In our example, it will look like this: BOAWDINAP? Another example. Say you have an account with Facebook. The letters can be FB. Adding this to your phrased password will look like this: FBWDINAP?

Too easy? OK, you are not convinced that it is strong enough. Add a symbol between them. I will use the “+” sign for this purpose. The master phrased password will then be: +WDINAP? and for Facebook, like this: FB+WDINAP?

That’s it. It can be done and it is easy to remember. Most important, is that it is unique and a very strong password. No need to write this down anywhere. Want another example? My password is so strong I can not remember it = Mpissicnri.

Time to change those passwords.