Make a better password
Ugh, passwords. Am I right?
It’s about to be 2020. We all use passwords and if you don’t you are probably living off the grid which is impressive, kudos to you. However, again it is 2020 and chances are its been beaten into your head that your password choices suck. Don’t think they do? If your password consists of any of the following, its an old janky password:
- Birthdays
- Pets name
- Children’s name
- Anniversary dates
- Less than 12 characters
- Or any of these
If any of your passwords match the above criteria please change it. Whats worse is if you are like most people you share the same password for multiple uses. Your computer logon password might be your banking password or online shopping logon. I know, I sound harsh and honestly I’m not passing judgement. We’re human and most of us don’t understand the need for being secure online. It’s all fun and games until an account gets compromised and you start loosing money that you will probably care. So I’m going to help you out. I’m going to show you how to have an easily remembered and complicated password.
Make your own password system
Here is what we are aiming for:
- At least 10 characters long
- Upper case, lower case, numbers and special character
- No plain words
- No personal information
- And most importantly, unique to every logon
That last one seems hard but it’s really easy here’s how. We all have that one password we reuse, I’m going to tell you something very taboo. It’s okay to do that….if you modify it for every logon you have.
Lets use a method that I call Colorful Animals.
First, pick an animal (preferably one that isn’t a known favorite of yours. Lets go with this:
bison
Now bison by itself is insecure and will get cracked immediately because it’s a dictionary word. So what do we need to do? Let’s make it a little more secure by adding numbers and variations of upper and lower case characters, this is part of your system and will be the word that never changes but let’s identify that system first. What I mean by that is that for our animal we always do the following things:
1.) Capitalize the first letter
2.) The first letter that can be turned into a number, change it
3.) The first letter that can be turned into a special character, change it
Doing that to the word bison we come up with this:
B1$on
Now this is better but not quite there, even though the password is more complicated its still easily crackable because bad guys know to switch out letters with number and special characters that look like letters. But here is the best part about this. This is the only part of the password you have to remember. Why? Because now we add a color. Not just any color though, pick a color that reminds you of what you are logging on to. What comes to mind when you think of Netflix? I bet its red right? Lets see what we do next:
redB1$on
Looks better but needs a bit more. We still have two things to take care of which is no plain words and a minimum of 10 characters. So let’s keep up with the password system we did with the animal. Lets always capitalize the first letter of our color and change the first character that we can into a number:
R3dB1$on
And now for the finishing touches, make your animal confused!
R3dB1$on????
Adding more special characters at the end makes our password 12 characters. Special disclaimer though, some website logins have special criteria that may limit things like repeat characters. You just need to play around with a system that works for you. Maybe have your password surrounded by the question marks instead:
??R3dB1$on??
Now if you skipped to the bottom of the page and see this password you are probably wondering how the hell am I supposed to remember that? Just remember your system!
1.) The animal of your password never changes.
2.) The color is something that reminds you of what you are logging on to.
3.) Add special characters to the same place in every password you use until you get to 10 characters (or more)
And that’s it, you now have a password system to create easier to remember passwords but the best part is that you now can have unique passwords for every login you use. Also, don’t just use my example, come up with your own. You can use any type of noun instead of your animal like cereal brands, countries, flower types etc. Hell I would say as long as you make it complicated enough to use the name of the website you are using:
??N3TF1XB1$on??
Same thing goes with the colors just make it a type of adjective you can remember. The key to a good password is to make it so that it is complicated and easily remembered so you don’t have to write it down or save it in a document somewhere. I also advise getting a password manager but we can talk about that later. I hope this helps and if you need some more tips feel free to reach out to me. My next post I will be talking about how to make a really good passphrase!