How to create a strong password – Guide
The best passwords will prevent brute force and dictionary attacks, but you can also make them easier to remember. try these passwords tricks to make your accounts unbreakable. Every week, our investigators roam up the latest security news and report our findings on these blog pages. If you’re reading, you may have noticed a particularly nasty trend claiming new victims of data breaches week by week. For the past two months, we’ve been reporting on Carnival Cruises, ProcterU, and Garmin. And that’s just some of them. Your passwords give you access to your personal empire, so you’re probably wondering ‘what are the best practices for creating strong passwords’ to protect your accounts from these cybercriminals. If your passwords were part of the breach, you must change them immediately.
What is a strong password?
A strong password is one that you cannot guess or crack using a brute force attack. Hackers use computers to try various combinations of letters, numbers and symbols in search of the correct password. Modern computers can crack short passwords consisting only of letters and numbers in mere moments. As such, strong passwords consist of a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special symbols such as punctuation. They must be at least 12 characters long, although we recommend one that is even longer. Overall, here are the main characteristics of a good and secure password: When you are configuring up an online account, there will often be prompts to remind you to include numbers or a certain number of characters. Some may even prevent you from setting a “weak password”, which is usually an easy-to-guess word or combination of numbers. But even if you are not reminded to set a strong password, it is very important to do this whenever you are configuring up a new online account or change passwords for any existing account.
A long password is a good password
When it comes to password security, length really matters. We recommend opting for a password that is at least 12 characters long, even longer if you can. Each additional symbol in a password exponentially increases the number of possible combinations. This makes passwords of a certain length essentially indecipherable, assuming you’re not using common phrases.
A strong password is not obvious
A good password needs to be something that is really hard for someone to guess or crack, so don’t choose anything too generic like “password” or “12345”. The last two options are still among the most popular passwords in the world and also among the least useful.
Good passwords cannot contain memorable keyboard paths
Don’t use sequential keyboard paths like “qwerty” as hackers are likely to break them. If you haven’t put in the effort to think of a good password, chances are hackers won’t need much effort to crack it.
Password strength is not personal
It’s very important that you don’t use anything personal to you, like a nickname, your date of birth, or your pet’s name. This is information that is really easy for a hacker to find out simply by looking at your social media, finding your work profile online, or even listening to a conversation you are having with someone else.
A good password must be unique
Once you’ve created a strong password, you might be tempted to use that password for all your online accounts. But if you do, you will be more vulnerable to various attacks. After all, if a hacker manages to figure out your password, they can log into every account you use that password for, which could include your emails, your social media, and your work accounts. Many people use the same password for everything because it’s easier to remember. But don’t worry because we have many tips and tricks to help you manage multiple passwords a little further down.
Avoid previous passwords
It’s also very important to make sure you don’t recycle your passwords, especially if they’ve been hacked before. This might seem obvious, but once you’ve used a password, you shouldn’t reuse it. Even if you haven’t used it in years, you better come up with a new one. Especially if you’ve had problems with a password being hacked in the past.
Special characters in passwords
While using special characters in your passwords is a good way to make them more secure, not all online accounts allow you to use any symbol you want. But most will allow you to use the following:
good examples of passwords
Here are some good examples of strong passwords: They all consist of a seemingly random and long (15+ characters) collection of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters. These passwords are not generic and do not contain any memorable keypaths or personal information that hackers could use.
Ideas for creating a good password
Fortunately, there are many things you can do to create unique, strong passwords for each of your online accounts. We have a ready-made password generator tool that generates unique and nearly impossible passwords. Alternatively, you should follow our top tips and ideas about how to set up a good password:
Use a password generator
If you don’t have time to come up with your own strong passwords, a password generator is a very quick and easy way to get a unique strong password. Our own strong password generator will create a string of random characters. Copy and use it as a password for your device, email, social media account or anything else that requires private access.
Choose a password instead of a password
Passwords are much more secure than passwords because they are often longer, making them more difficult to guess or brute force. So instead of picking a word, pick a phrase and take the first letters, numbers, and punctuation from that phrase to generate a seemingly random combination of characters. You can even replace the first letter of a word with a number or symbol to make it even safer. Or try to change words for punctuation like we used to in the days of text slang, if you can remember it that far. Here are some examples of How to use the password method to create strong passwords:
Opt for a safer version of the dictionary method
A popular method for choosing a password is to open a dictionary or book and choose a random word. But as random as it may seem to you, a single word is actually pretty easy for a hacker to guess. So instead of opting for just one word from the dictionary, pick a few and put them together together with numbers and symbols to make it that much more complicated for someone to figure out. Here are some examples of good password ideas created with this method:
Play with phrases and quotes
If you want a password that is difficult to guess but easy to remember, it might be a good idea to use a variation of a meaningful phrase or quote. Simply take a phrase you will remember and replace some of the letters with numbers and symbols. Here are some examples of strong password ideas generated with this method:
use emoticons
If you want to add symbols to your passwords without making them harder to remember, you can always use emoticons. Although you cannot add emoji, you can use emoticons, which are the encoded versions, usually made up punctuation, letters and/or numbers. Here are some emoticons you can use in your passwords:
Customize your passwords for specific accounts
once you came up with a strong password that you can remember, you will still have to create different passwords for each of your online accounts. But instead of starting the whole process all over again, you can simply add a different code to your password for each online account. So, for example, if your password was cHb1%pXAuFP8 and you wanted to make it unique to your eBay account, you could add £bay to the final to know it’s different from your original password, but still memorable. Here’s how this could work:
Confirm your password in muscle memory
If you want to remember your password, it might be a good idea to practice typing it in several times. Eventually, if you type correctly enough, you’ll develop muscle memory which will mean it’s much easier for you to remember.
Final note
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