How to Create Strong Passwords

Passwords protect unauthorized users from gaining access to your personal accounts. These accounts can be your email ID, your social networking profile, your bank account, your Netflix subscription, etc. Passwords offer protection to the user and offer a way of authentication to the service that the user is using.

However, cracking passwords is one of the oldest things being done by cyber-criminals. Perhaps cyber-criminal is too harsh a term to be used in this context, for almost everyone tried their hand at cracking the password of their friend’s profiles or accounts at least one.

In today’s world, though, data breach and phishing attacks are taking place at an alarming place. User accounts are being compromised, giving the attacker access to sensitive information. To help you protect yourself from this, we will tell you how to create and remember strong passwords.

Strong Passwords

Creating a strong password is easier than remembering it. The best methods are those that can help you out with both of these tasks. We have compiled a list of methods that do just that.

1. Passphrase

Electrum is a wallet for the crypto-currency Bitcoin, which generates a 12-word seed for accessing your bitcoin addresses. This is an example of a passphrase, where random words are used to generate a unique password that is both easy to remember as well as strong. Choose a sentence that is easy to remember but not a common one. You can also choose 12 random words to form a sentence. The longer the passphrase, the harder it is to crack.

2. Phonetic Memory

Strong passwords that are simple to say and type are easier to remember. When using a random password generator, people face the problem of remembering their passwords. However, using Phonetic Muscle Memory technique, you can get that job done. You can create many random passwords and then choose one that is easy to say and type. For example, MsFan41 can be remembered as Miss Fan 41.

3. PAO

PAO stands for Person-Action-Object. It is based on the idea that the human mind finds it simpler to remember things which it can visualize, and the stranger the images are, the easier they are to remember. To use PAO, first visualize a famous place, and then visualize a famous person. You can think of The Niagara Falls and Megan Fox for the purpose. Then imagine a random action with a random object. You can think of a UFO and twirling. So, you get Megan Fox twirling on a UFO over Niagara Falls. You can now use the words in this sentence to form passwords that are random, strong, and easy to remember, like MegTwiFalls or something like that.

4. Sentence Passwords

Another easy method is to take a sentence and turn it into a password. This can be done with any random sentence that you can remember easily. For example, ‘Mesut Ozil tore the opposition defence apart’ can be formed into a password as MesOZtorOpp$ef@p@rt.

Conclusion

In this article, we saw some methods to create as well as remember strong passwords. People know the importance of having strong passwords, but they often find themselves unable to remember passwords that are random and strong. Using these methods can help you with that and keep yourself protected.

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