How To Create Strong Password. Internet Security is the top priority nowadays and every web service is pressing on selecting a good strong password. But the problem is that if a password is good, it won’t be easy and if it is easy, it won’t be good enough. So how do we choose the right password to maintain our internet security?
Let’s first have a look at several web services and what they say about selecting passwords.
Google recommends you to create a strong password
And Microsoft is even more particular about creating a strong password
With all these recommendations from these tech giants let us finalize the best minimum requirements for a good password.
- More than 8 characters in length.
- Unique for every Account and service.
- At least 1 Lowercase and Uppercase letter.
- 1 Numeric Character.
- 1 Special Character.
So let us create a password considering the above requirements.
Step 1
Choose a random 2, 3 word codename. This doesn’t have to be related to you. Just a random codename. Examples of a few code-names are White Elephant, Eagle Eye, Danger Dave, etc. just choose anything you like. I am selecting Eagle Eye for now. So join both the terms.
Current Password = ‘EagleEye’.
Step 2
Replace any one letter with special characters so that a becomes @, S becomes $, H becomes #, L becomes | and so on. You can see that the replacement we are selecting looks similar to the original character. This is just to prevent against brute force attacks. Now I am replacing the letter a with @.
Current Password = ‘E@gleEye’
Step 3
Take the dominant letters from the name of your website. If on google you can use gl, on Facebook you can use fb, ig on Instagram, tw on Twitter, and so on.
I will select fb here. Now put that at the very beginning after a # symbol.
Current Password = ‘#fbE@gleEye’
It’s becoming impossible to crack. Isn’t it? But some more complexity will make it stronger.
Step 4
There will always be a name associated with that account, just take the first letter of that name and concatenate it to the password. My name is ‘Rishabh’ so I will use the letter ‘r’.
Current Password = ‘#fbE@gleEyer’
Step 5
If you have multiple accounts on the same service, just number them in order and add that number to the end of your password. This is going to be my second fb account as i already use an fb account so I will use the number 2 and will add a little magic to it by converting it to a different form.
I could make it 200, 020,002,12(1 being the constant). For now i would just use 02.
Current and Final = ’#fbE@gleEyer02’
So Let’s see if our new password meets all requirements.
- More than 8 characters in length.
- Unique for every Account and service.
- At least 1 Lowercase and Uppercase letter.
- 1 Numeric Character.
- 1 Special Character.
Hurray! Now if you were to make an account for Netflix, all you would have to do would be to replace ‘fb’ with ‘nx’ and ’02’ to ‘01’. This way we get a unique password for every service and still be able to remember them all.
Conclusion
We discussed how to create a unique and easy to remember the password for every service and account we have. You can obviously try your own similar implementations of several things like when selecting the dominant characters from the service name you could select fc, bk,fbk for Facebook.
I hope you guys will create stronger passwords from now on.