How To Create Secure Passwords?

Have you ever been a victim of hacking? Has anyone ever taken control of your email or bank account by cracking your password? Are you looking out for a guide to create strong and secure passwords? You have come at the right place. This article explains how to create unbreakable passwords and protect your account from hackers.

Few things you should always remember before creating a password:

• The longer the password, the harder it is to crack. Make sure your password is atleast 12 characters.
• Your password should be a mix of numbers,capitalization,special characters,spellings and punctuations.
• You should avoid using simple nouns
• Use replacements for a strong password. It means that you should replace “s” with “$”, “i” with “!”, “for” with “4” and so on.
• Avoid reusing your old passwords.
• Always change your passwords after 3 months.

Recently Adobe published the list of 20 most commonly used passwords stolen from Adobe. Adobe also published an advisory asking users not to create simple passwords and put some effort in creating strong passwords. This list goes on as:

• 123456
• 123456789
• password
• admin
• 12345678
• qwerty
• 1234567
• 111111
• photoshop
• 123123
• 1234567890
• 000000
• abc123
• 1234
• adobe1
• macromedia
• azerty
• iloveyou
• aaaaaa
• 654321

If you can find your password in the above list, then its time you pay a serious thought to changing it. Now, the next question that arises is “How do I create an unbreakable password”. There are four major methods through which you can create safe and secure passwords.

1.The Electrum Method/ The Passphrase Method

This method is used in managing Bitcoin wallets. It is one of the best methods to create a highly safe and secure password. There is an Electrum Wallet which offers you a wallet generation seed. The seed is essential to access the Bitcoin address. If lost, the access to Bitcoin address is also lost along with it. However, in order to restore access to the wallet, along with the seed it also offers a 12 worded mnemonic code. This type of code is known as a passphrase. Passphrases have now opened altogether a new alternative to passwords. There increasing use can be highlighted from the fact that the password cracking softwares nowadays also include a feature to crack passphrases. They do so by making use of commonly used dictionary words. It’s better to create your own long passphrases containing non-dictionary words to be on a safer side. Please dont pickup phrases from poems or literature like “Marry had a little lamb”. Making your own phrase would make more difficult for any person or application to crack and also easier for you to remember. The passphrase can make sense or no-sense at all. Something like “ Johnny needs stars because my duck took away the lonely moon” or something purely random like “Lotus Statue Tiger Everest Banana Cotton Candy Blue Blizzard Automatic University Neighbor Baltimore”

2. Breaking the sentence Method

This method is quite simple and many people use it including the professional security experts. All you need to do is take a sentence and then turn it into the password. Let me explain it to you.

Let’s consider a sentence: Yaay! Messi scored a goal

You can rewrite it as : Y@YMe$C$c0@l

3. The Person-Action-Object (PAO) method

The Person Action Object (PAO) method was suggested by the computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University who believed that memorization techniques coupled with mnemonic devices would help to create highly secure passwords. This method was also popularized in Joshua Foer’s book “Moonwalking with Einstein”. Its quite simple to create passwords using this method and not even people close to you can make a guess. Select a random Person like Michael Phelps, a random object like Mount Everest and a random action like Running. Now link the Person Action and the Object to create a sentence. In this case we can make one such as “Michael Phelps found running a marathon on Mount Everest”. You can further break this passphrase using the “Breaking the Sentence Method” something like “Miphforumeverest”

4. Using Random Password Generator

There are many random password generator websites which can help you create strong random passwords. The deal with these passwords is that they are so random that it becomes difficult for a person to remember them. All you need to do is create strong passwords using these websites and then store your passwords in a password manager app like LastPass, 1Password etc. These apps will store all your strong passwords. All you need to do is to integrate them with your browser and just remember one strong password for your account created in these apps.

Once you have created a password you can check its strength at online password checkers like Online Domain Tools. Nowadays almost all web pages provide a measure of strength of your password at the same time when you are creating one. You should always pay heed to that.