How To Remember Strong Passwords

The risk of using a simple password is that they are actually quite easy to guess. Easier than you may think. A surprising number of people still use the name of a loved one, or a pet, or a film star - and it doesn't take long to get this information from people.

The danger of using the same password for each account is that once the password is known to someone else then all your accounts are vulnerable. It is then a lot of effort to remember to visit all those sites that you have accounts with and to change every password.

So what we need to do is to create a simple, easy to use, easy to remember, method of creating strong and secure passwords that are different for every account we have.

You don't need any pens, paper, crib sheets to do this. All you need is you, and a little bit of creativity.

Think of a word, any word, perhaps 3, 4 or 5 characters long. For this example the word I'm going to use is "Treat" with an upper case T at the start. That was the first word that came into my head when I was writing this paragraph.

Maintaining a theme here, I need you to think of another word. As before make it quite a short one, but not too short. The first word I thought of was "Box" so I'll use that.

Take the two words you thought of in steps 1 and 2 and simply join them together, it really is that simple. Remember your joined up word this will form the core of your future passwords. In the example our core password is the nonsense word "TreatBox".

Now let's add a couple of random characters from our keyboard. We do this step because a lot of secure web sites now demand that our passwords have at least one numeric character in them, so lets add a number. In this case I'm going to choose "8", and I'll add another random character which will be "i".

This second character could have also been a number, it could have been upper case, it could have been a punctuation mark (although some sites don't like punctuation marks in their passwords).

So now we everything together and the base of our future passwords "TreatBox8i" is starting to look quite random, but is very easy to remember. Which is good.

This is a good starting point for our password. It is already 10 characters long, it has lower and upper case letters and it has a number. Yet it is surprisingly easy to remember.

Now we need to make our passwords different for each and every site we visit. The easiest way to do that is to simply add the site name to our password. For example your PayPal password would become "TreatBox8iPayPal", your Squidoo password would be "TreatBox8iSquidoo", and so on.

This is absolutely fine, but it does extend the password length somewhat. And if you ever did have to write down your password for some reason then the site name would give away too much information.

So there has to be a better solution. You could use the first 2 or 3 characters of the site name. I personally prefer to use the first and last letter of the site name. Using the examples above PayPal becomes "Pl" and Squidoo becomes "So". Our new, strong passwords are "TreatBox8iPl" and "TreatBox8iSo" respectively.

That's it! It is that simple to create passwords which are still easy to use, easy to remember and relatively a lot stronger than the ones you previously have been using.

All you have to do is remember your two words, "Treat" and "Box" in this example. Your extra random characters which were "8i" above. And then remember the way you remember each specific site - using the first and last letters in the examples given.

Of course, if you are feeling adventurous you could mix things up a little to make things even more personal. How about using and uppercase last letter of each word instead, e.g. "treaT", or placing the random characters between the words to create something like "Treat8iBox".

You can also manipulate the characters in each specific site in a different way, how about chosing the 3rd character and the last two from the site name, producing "yal" for PayPal.

The point is that so long as you create your rules and stick to them for all your passwords then this system works very well indeed and is easy to remember.

You get the idea. Once you have your personal words and rules it is easy to follow them for every single site you join in the future, and you can start to change your bank account passwords right now!

Microsoft provide a useful tool that gives an indication of password strength. Why not test your password right now?

The Microsoft password test rates TreatBox8iSo as STRONG.

There is another on-line password strength checker at PasswordMeter.com. It rates TreatBox8iSo as STRONG with a score of 64%.

Of course, the method shown above isn't 100% fool proof and a determined identity thief may find other ways to get access to your accounts. However, this makes things that little bit harder for the thief and it might not be worth their while to target you. In the meantime you can rest assured that your on-line accounts are now protected so much better than when you used your pet's name for every account.